Easttopics is proud to present Milica Mijajlović’s first solo exhibition in Hungary as a result of the young artist’s residency in Budapest.

Milica Mijajlović: How am I to protect my wax-built Castles of love from the devouring heat of your fires? 
5 September - 12 October, 2019
Easttopics Space, Budapest 

 Featuring her most recent paintings on textile as well as objects and a video piece realized specifically for this show, the project explores the artist’s reminiscences about the Yugoslav war, more precisely about the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 that she experienced as a small child. The flashes of the explosions that she first innocently misinterpreted as fireworks constitute the central motif of her works, which conceptualize – both in their symbolic content and in their technical characteristics – the swirling confusion and antithetic emotions felt ever since by the artist in the apprehension of this traumatic period.

This disconcerting bitter sweet characteristic of her present practice further unfolds in objects combining used, dirty wheel trims and forms made of caramelized sugar that evoke sharp serrated blades or elaborated fire arms. The artist's new video work explores her equally ambivalent relation to Serbian turbo-folk music and its flashy, latex-dressed performers who became national stars during the nineties, the Milošević regime and the Yugoslav war. Therefore, not only does Milica Mijajlović deal with her individual war trauma, but also tackles a phenomena all of us can relate to; the embellishment of childhood experiences - should they be related to food, music, clothing, visual culture or more concretely perturbing events such as international conflicts - and the disillusive reflection, critical processing of these memories as a necessary operation to become adult.

Milica Mijajlović (1993) is a student at the Department of Fine Arts at The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague, in the class of Michal Novotný and Jiří Černický. Her artistic practice focuses mostly on painting, though recently she has been working with other media such as text, objects and performance. Her work is predominantly a reflection of her personal memories which she connects with current issues, mostly using the language of symbols. Her most recent solo shows are Awaiting a Big Event at the Rampa Gallery in Usti nad Labem (Czech Republic) and Wish You Were Not Here at The Solution in Prague (Czech Republic). She is originally from Belgrade, Serbia, but currently she is based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Easttopics is dedicated to the promotion of the Eastern European contemporary art field. Working as a think tank for the Eastern European art communities, Easttopics is a genuinely interdisciplinary cooperative which goal is to draw the Eastern contemporary art field and the international art scene closer to each other. This cross-border project took form as an expanding on-line website and database until now. At last we have the chance to step out the online world and open our offline exhibition space. Easttopics focuses on the following countries: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine.

Photos: Atóth Dávid