Vladimir Miladinović
The Notebook, 2020
The Notebook presents the intriguing yet banal diaries of Yugoslav war monger Ratko Mladić. General Mladić, a.k.a. “the butcher of Bosnia”, oversaw the bombardment of Sarajevo, the infamous Srebrenica massacre, and a bunch of blitzes and ‘cleanses’ resulting in disfigured lives, tortured bodies, woeful death agonies and zealous ultra-nationalism. Back in 2017, General Ratko Mladić, a big dog Bosnian-Serb military figure, pogram organizer and prolific blood-splatterer, was sentenced to life in jail for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Vladimir Miladinović (1981) lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. He graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade and has completed doctoral level courses in the department of Art and Media Theory at the University of Arts, Belgrade. He has been working as an independent artist since 2007. He was a member of the Working Group “Four Faces of Omarska” an art/theory group that questions memorial production strategies. Miladinović’s main interests lie with the politics of remembering, media manipulation and the creation and reinterpretation of history. His work engages with war and post-war trauma. It deals with media, forensics, political and ethical identification and presentation of war crimes, but also with current transitional ideologies of denial and erasure. It questions how the media and institutions of post-war societies create public space, consequently shaping collective memory. He is using art as a forum to create a counter-public sphere that raises questions about war, media propaganda, manipulation of narrative, historical responsibility and intellectual engagement. Miladinović was the laureate of the 53rd October Salon Award in Belgrade and won the award from “Vladimir Veličković” fond. Currently he is at the residency in the UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre researching at Stanley Kubrick’s archive and is part of The VEM-Visual Embodied Methodologies network based within the King’s College in London.
He has exhibited widely across Europe, including at the SMBA – Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (Amsterdam), Artium – Basque Museum Centre of Contemporary Art (Vitoria), Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), FreiraumQ21 – Museumsquartier (Vienna), CACT-Thessaloniki Center Of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), The Exchange (London) etc.