Dragan Vojvodić
Persona and Her Shadow
On display August 11 – September 10, 2022
Dragan Vojvodić’s exhibition takes two opposing concepts devised by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung — the “persona,” a social mask or the self that is presented to the world, and the “shadow,” one’s more latent disposition — as his framework for examining the complex position of an artist. In his work, he at once presents a public image, a “persona,” but he is also aware that his “shadow” – the darker, more chaotic aspects of one’s psyche – is an integral part of the artmaking process.
Additionally, Vojvodić investigates his own artistic attitudes, education, and individual character, as well as the experience of growing up within a turbulent political and economic system. He witnessed the disintegration of his own homeland, the Former Yugoslavia (SFRY), during the 1990s. Since leaving the city of his youth, Sarajevo, Vojvodić has been in constant motion. Over the years, he has visited numerous artists’ residencies around the world in search of the space for creation.
This exhibition features photographs, prints, sculptures, videos, and installations that reflect his global and diverse aesthetic and political perspectives. Vojvodić’s works also engage directly with a history of Conceptual Art, and he cites artists Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, and John Cage as significant predecessors for his own practice.
About the Artist:
Multimedia artist Dragan Vojvodić graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia and entered into a dialogue with the contemporary art scene in the second half of the 1990s. A painter by primary vocation, he soon discovered new and provocative possibilities of interdisciplinary thinking and action. He focuses his research on performance, art action, installation, photography, video, and space intervention, often combining them and creating a multimedia dialogue. Born in Sarajevo, Vojvodić witnessed the disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As a result of this unrest, exile and nomadism influence his artistic process. Most of his works reflect socio-political issues and personal responses to international travel and were produced during artist-in-residency projects abroad, including USA, Japan, Iceland, Norway, Finland.
Dragan Vojvodić is currently living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Photographs by Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić
In the spirit of conceptual artistic practice, Vojvodić uses the procedures of repetition and variation in photographs of himself standing in the same position in different places, including Reykjavik, New York, Tokyo, and Hiroshima. The shifting landscapes and cityscapes emphasize the nomadic presence of the artist. The posture of his own figure in the photographs does not simply allude to the Romantic motif of Rückenfigur, a figure seen from behind in historical landscape painting and photography, but can be understood as a statement of his anonymity and feelings of placelessness. Clothed in a black hoodie and black pants, the artist hides his identity as he stares intently toward the sea, cities, mountains, and a massive bonfire. While a Rückenfigur in a composition often encourages the viewer to identify with the body and to be similarly awed by the landscape, Vojvodić’s enigmatic, silhouetted stance impedes this analogy. Vojvodić, hiding his own identity, ironically calls the series of photographs a portrait study.
Iceland
Photographs by Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić
This performance, realized during a research project in Iceland, examines the phenomena of memory, personal and collective identity, and the shifting contexts of social values through the process of artistic nomadism. When he was in this sublime landscape, Vojvodić sought to critically observe himself through the process of self-isolation and alienation, both in relation to the environment he came to and the environment in which he found himself.
Here, Vojvodić questions the notion of belonging – as an exiled artist, a stateless person, a migrant, a cosmopolitan – and creates his own flag, the artist's flag. After the disintegration of his homeland, Former Yugoslavia (SFRY), and the change of the political paradigm, the symbol of the five-pointed star became a taboo, a silenced pejorative. Following Russian artist Kazimir Malevich's contextualization of black as pure energy, Vojvodić creates a black flag with a black five-pointed star that represents art, the artist's credo and being, as well as his path and position of non-belonging.
Ozone Gallery
Belgrade, Serbia
The artist transforms the aggressive and threatening statement “Skinheads until true death,” apropriated from a Skinhead ideology, into “Artist until true death,” using his own skin as a medium. Changing the subject of a Skinhead declaration into an oath to creativity, the artist contrasts the intimate surface of human skin with the dissemination of fascist ideology. The word “ARTIST” is inked on his body in a typography suggestive of German Fraktur, which has assocations with Neo-Nazi groups. Vojvodić’s artistic and personal act is understood as fiercely opposed to racism, antisemitism, and fascism of this Skinhead subculture.
This work was created during the artist’s residency at the TYPA Museum of Printing and Paper in Tartu, Estonia in 2020. The author uses the pages of geographical atlas printed in the USSR (1922-1991), found in the archives of the TYPA Museum, as a readymade element to which he applies the same text over all depicted regions. The pages of the atlas partially show the globe and are further obscured by the artist’s words: “I did not want to be anything. All I ever wanted was to be myself.” This quotation is appropriated from Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), who wrote, “I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.”
Although each sheet of the geographical atlas is printed with identical words, its semantics depend on the partially presented geographical units that together form the globe. Vojvodić used an old Gutenberg press that belongs to the TYPA Museum of Paper and Printing to set the type, in order to emphasize the historical aspect of the printing process. In a conceptual sense, the work makes the artist’s presence in the world known, while also questioning the nature of art, the position of the artist, and its specificity in relation to history, culture and society.
Bergen, Norway
Photograph by Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić
Dragan Vojvodić carried a black square painting in the city center of Bergen, Norway to question the meaning and legacy of Kazimir Malevich’s revolutionary, abstract painting Black Square (1915). In each photograph, Vojvodić replaces the white background of Malevich’s painting with the cityscape. The city became a part of the image, and the same time, the artist inserted art into everyday space and city life.
Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad
The performance is based on (self) reaction and visual communication with the audience. As a transfer of that communication, the only prop that the artist uses is a mirror. During the action, the artist occupies vertical sculptural positions through which he suggests strength and vulnerability at the same time. According to the theory that the microcosm is the reaction of the macrocosm, the artist asserts that man and the universe are in the mutual position of two mirrors. The mirror, in addition to providing the possibility of reaction in the direction of the audience, becomes a threat not only to (self) cognition of imperfections and end, but also a physical threat of destruction.
In the last position he occupies, the artist allows the possibility of breaking the mirror with the various connotations that the epilogue implies, leaving the end of the performance to pure coincidence, destruction, or survival, which he no longer influences or controls.