Small talk by the Border

Monday 19-02 t/m Thur 22-02 
Opening Monday 20:00
Ognjen Gligorijević

A cubic hall, characterized by blue lights, overlapping scaffoldings, and a looping soundscape. The senses become blurred, as the perception of colors, sounds, and depth distorts. Seemingly inscrutable and undisclosed. 

Ognjen Gligorijević is an artist, creative director, and type designer living and working between Niš, RS and Amsterdam, NL. Employing various mediums like painting, installation, sound, and video, Gligorijević’s multidisciplinary art practice intently reworks space to extend one’s perception of reality, transforming identities and social roles. 

In “Small Talks By The Border”, the installation explores normed and deviant identities and their social categorization in modern intercultural power dynamics. This is the border, a non-space where subjectivities are lost in rigid classification, morphing between conformity and non-conformity. As scaffolding on open construction sites, “Others” is an identity cyclically constructed and deconstructed. Invisible and abstruse, as if disguised with a black mask.

The core concept, reiterated by video and sound design, gradually materializes in the exhibition through physical works that either echo or deconstruct it, adding different levels of interpretation. A face appears concealed by a black mask; identity unknown, hidden, denied. Amid the scaffoldings, the “EU citizens” sign flashes brightly as the counterpart “Others” seems depersonalized and generalizing. Two pathways, two identities, seemingly belonging but visibly separated. United by being something other than the arbitrarily defined norm, wanting to but unable to fully acculturate.