14th EX PONTO / Accompanying Programme
Nemanja Cvijanović / Repetitio est mater studiorum

23 September 2007 > 05 October 2007

I Pay Electricity (installation, 2005)
Mantra (video, 2005)
The project Repetitio est Mater Studiorum is the Slovenian debut of the young Croatian-born artist Nemanja Cvijanović. The project combines two pieces that reinvestigate and address collective memory as well as the social and political heritage of the territories of former Yugoslavia, a country in which the storm of transition wrought thorough changes and transformations in political, economic, cultural and social life. In his work, the artist draws from the symbolic, ideological and historical iconography of the now deceased Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is often addressed as a ‘dark’ chapter in the collective memory. With a heavy dose of irony and frank nostalgia, Cvijanović draws attention to the fact that the march of capital engenders a neglect and discrediting of this historical-political subject whose mythology is related to such vanishing positive values as world justice, equality, brotherhood, unity as well as other idealistic postulates dictated by utopia.
Mara Vujić