PARALLEL LIFE, 2005

 

Joint project of Sejla Kameric and Uros Djuric

The collaboration between S.K. Bosnian artist and U.D., Serbian artist is a media conducted project that will have it’s initial presentation on the October Salon in Belgrade in 2005. Through a series of ‘media sensations (gossip columns, celebrity magazines) the artistic couple presents itself through a carefully orchestrated secret love affair (paparazzi snapshots, sensational headlines).

The exposed project in the salon will consist of a reconstructed room of their imaginary habitat with the “wedding picture” as a crown evidence and theoretical texts on turbo-folk phenomena and the sate of culture at present, written on the walls.

“Mythical couple” is an artificial structure that follows the pop media pattern of postwar mentality developed in the former Yugoslav territory. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ of the 21st century can be recognized today through a binary structure of a football player and a model (Sejla was a model and Uros’s works often deal with football culture)

Their fairytale story surpasses all the difficulties encountered (infidelities, Uros alias Uki is already married) and inevitably ends in a marriage ceremony.

The couple presents itself at the same time as a mimetic, archetypal image of a contemporary society and as its art equivalent through a “mirror image”. Bringing to surface the elements of  “turbo-folk aesthetics”  (a musical genre that developed into a proper “lifestyle”, summed up as a ‘quick money, good cars and good-looking woman’), the project aims to integrate itself in to the reality , and not place itself above it.

Despite the fact that their relation is virtual (and interestingly so, presented as such in the media; they incarnate the couple asepticized from difficulties of real life), it reflects the deep traumas of society “in transition” and the inversion produced in its system of values. The “natural” image of a “couple in love”, through its public manifestations, permits a reconstruction of the ideological background (the male ‘virility’ versus female ‘innocence’) all rolled up in a very specific ‘Balkan camp’ aesthetics.

Project outlined by Josko Tomasovic

“If the artist wants to get the better of these fantasms generated by society, he must accept the fact that art is a fantasmatical screen, and likewise that he alone is the structure which is supported by fantasm.
Precisely because the sphere of art allows that which is forbidden outside of this sphere, for obsessive artists, art (for the most part) does not take place in the sphere of art.”

Dejan Andjelkovich