6 – 20 November
Authored by Miloš Vujanović
Miloš Vujanović’s art project titled ’Shame’ consists of eleven paintings based on eleven frames taken from VHS recordings made between 1993 and 1995 in the war zone of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The frames were extracted from the VHS recordings by Ognjen Petrović. Most of the VHS recordings have been deleted from YouTube, which gives Vujanović’s paintings an additional documentary dimension.
All paintings were created using oil on canvas techniques and underpainted with acrylics. Owing to the precision of the frames with which the selected frames were transferred onto canvas, we could classify them as hyperrealism, but due to their blurriness (which is a consequence of the poor quality of the VHS recordings), they are not actually understood as hyperrealistic. The poor quality of the recordings was not the only problem the author faced in transferring the motifs from the frames to the canvas. By enlarging the frame dimensions, the ’pixelation’ of the already poor quality recording was further diminished. Each canvas had to have the proportions of YouTube clips (4:3 or 16:9), and it was also necessary to find the dimensions of the image that best suited the specific content of the frame being transferred to the canvas. In line with the “artistic documentary” quality that these images undoubtedly possess (both intentionally and unintentionally), the author titled them with tags, or rather ’addresses’ that the videos carried on the YouTube channel.
Miloš Vujanović called this project ’Shame’, both to convey the feeling that he, as an artist and as a human being, has toward everything that these images and the videos from which they were created captured, but also because such testimonies are increasingly simply ’erased’ from our lives. The artist’s personal sense of shame that stems from these images is, of course, also a paradigm, and encompasses the entire world in which we live.
Božidar Knežević