Clothes for Death

This afternoon I decided to visit the artist in the former army barracks and find out more about his project (wrote a bit about him in the previous post). After a bit of searching through the former military base which has now been converted into the University campus and after seeing some amazing spaces crying out to be made into studios or gallery spaces, we met Mladen. We struck a conversation and spent the following couple of hours hearing about his brilliant self imposed ‘art serving’. Mladen like most men in Bosnia and Herzegovina had to serve in the Army. Once he finished his army service he studied art at the Banja Luka Arts Academy, which during his studies moved to the former army barracks. He felt at this point that he needed to address this change in location and the whole narrative around the military service. In October last year he started his ‘art service’ and has not since left the University campus, lodging in the students accommodation and working either in his studio or in the surrounding area, which still resembles the military training ground. Every day he takes a photograph of himself standing and facing a point marked in turn on the map of the area. He also makes a piece of work every day, one of which he is holding in his hand in the photo shown here. Hope you can see his work and the image with text, I am also posting a close up of it. His work is really excellent, dealing cleverly with the army ideology, its position in the post-war society and incorporating a certain army aesthetic into his work by using for example helmets to pot flowers in, or old helmets with bullet holes with Xmas lights or creating drawing by shooting through the plaster boards etc. His site is www.iserveart.net