SARAJEVO (SEEcult.org) - The exhibition of a multidisciplinary project “I Serve Art” of Mladen Miljanovic, winner of the Zvono Award in 2007 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, will be opened on September 16 at the National Gallery of BH in Sarajevo, and will present the works conceived during his nine-month isolation (October 2006 - July 2007) in former army barracks Vrbas in the centre of Banja Luka.

Related links: www.scca.ba, www.mladenmiljanovic.com

According to Milanovic, the former army barracks Vrbas (today University campus) symbolically represent the central place of a totalitarian system's apparatus, whose traumatic consequences are still present in BiH society.

Deconstruction of identity of that place and of personal past happened through his nine months of residing within that confined space, expressed through performance and multimedia interventions. His personal connection to the previous function of that place is expressed through the fact that he had spent six months there as a trainee for reserve officer and three months as a trainer to 30 soldiers.

The goal of his repeated residence there for the same amount of time and ritual repetition of his psychological and physical state (with all its inhumane implications), was to question the limits of endurance of the artist's body in service of the art. Thus, art becomes a means of decontamination of space and its deconstruction, said Miljanovic on his work.

As he was starting this work in progress, he created a web page, which represented a work called “274 Views to the World", that adequately established communication between an isolated artist and the outside world - society. The final phase of the project was an intervention inside the building of former school for reserve officers,

which is now the Academy of Arts and the Rectorate of the Banja Luka University.

According to Miljanovic, this kind of artistic employment is both critical and investigative at the same time, and it represents a possible model for progressive artistic engagement.

Miljanovic is the winner of Zvono Award for 2007, which is established by the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Arts, together with

Foundation for Civil Society and Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York, as annual prize for young visual artists up to 35 years of age in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The award is part of the Young Visual Artists Awards (YVAA), which exists in several countries from the former Yugoslavia region, as well as Este Europe, including Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In each participating country the Award is named after one person or artist’s group deserving to the development in the field of Modern or Contemporary Art.

SCCA decided that the name of the Award as a tribute to the artist’s group, formed in Sarajevo in 1982 and active until the outbreak of war in 1992. The group, named after the Zvono café (The Bell) in which artists from this group met.