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Photo: Christian Redtenbacher 2 images
xy ungelöst – Reconstruction of the Crime
Milica Tomić
DVD-installation with audio, color
edition 1/5
13' 57''
1997
Acquisition 2000
Inv. No. 0072
On the 28th of March 1989, Albanian citizens of the Republic of Yugoslavia demonstrated against the repeal of the political autonomy which had been guaranteed to them by the constitution. Many of them were slaughtered in an outrageous massacre. With xy ungelöst, a 2-channel video installation, the Serbian artist Milica Tomić tries to keep the memory of this crime alive. In one of the images, one sees a number of her compatriots taking off their jackets, falling backwards into the snow and thus disappearing. What remains is the impression of their bodies. The other image shows the artist herself. She appears as “Kosovo girl” a mythical figure who tended to Serbian soldiers after their “glorious defeat” in the battle of Kosovo. The figure is also one of the central forms of Serbian women’s traditional identification. Tomić appears as a blind witness of the crime against the Albanians, with closed eyes and one artificial pupil painted on her eyelid. “My work is evidence for the never-ending dizziness which has come into being since the death of what we once called reality,” says the artist. “A dizziness that came about because the frame of reference – whether nation, class, race or gender – which secured our apparently fixed identities disappeared.”
Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)
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