The artistic method Mladen Miljanović is developing is based on three overlapping points: personal professional shift from the school of military officers to the art academy; socio-political context of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina and new power relations in transitional society; translation of his art production built on narration that sublimated the former refferential points in the form of objects, installations, actions, interventions or occupations into the broader global art context. The choice of such method shows that the artist has from the very first projects already decided that his art production should inherently reflect (the failures in) his personal identity building process and the consequences on his position in art system and society. After the period of nine months (2006/2007) self-isolation in the abandoned military barracks in Banjaluka where he decided to Serve Art as he was serving people in the army in 2001, Mladen Miljanović have conceived another project under the title Occupational Therapy. If the project I Serve Art was radically aiming at „purification and catharsis“ through repetition of the “existential” experience (nachträglichkeit) and quest for ways of anthropologically operating with his art, the Occupational Therapy project shows conceptual awareness of the possibilities of work with the chosen method in the art system. The theoretical background of the therapy that is dealing with re-socialization or ability for social adaptation of the patient through different working processes – art, sports or crafts, is here understood both as reflection (or ironization?) of the individual position of a “traumatised subjet”, a person coming from socio-political context of country that disolved in ethnic clashes, as well as metaphor for the “occupation” of the art system with the production of works that is exactly taking this context as a source for materialisation of different artefacts. Thus produced objects or installations, visual representations, like Reproduction, Identification and Mechanism of Relation that were chosen for the exhibition from the Occupation Therapy series, could be seen as “sublimation of negative past”.  

  Finaly, the title of the exhibition Holiday of Discomfort that already discloses the feeling of unease, inner conflicts and contextual instability, shows the decision of the artist to focus on social status of such a traumatized subject and is conceptualy reffering to the “occupation” of “psycho-social space and therapeutic reconstruction of its shattered fragments” as the artist himself has been pointed out in his statement.

Zoran Erić