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„Bag-People“ Mladen Stilinovic´ In Mladen Stilinovic´’s installation “Bag People”, everyday life and history find themselves in a non-relationship, similarly to those who are photographed: everyone goes along by themselves, and yet at the same time they are linked by a shared life situation. Stilinovic´ photographed the “Bag People” in Jakusˇeva – a suburb of Zagreb, which is equated for him with poverty. Here people sell everything possible, down to their “last shirt”, in a large black market. Goods are offered on newspapers, whose daily news plays no role in the form of a sales display. At the same time, though, the news is relevant to the “Bag People”, whose poverty is not a “given” one, but is instead the consequence of political conjunctions. Since the downfall of socialism after 1989 due to economic and political developments, many people find themselves forced to find new forms of survival: from informal economies all the way to migration. This juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness, change and resignation, is recreated in this installation by Stilinovic´, who has repeatedly addressed the theme of poverty under changing political conditions in his work since the 1970s. It is always a matter of a rejected or impossible counterpart: “Bag People” and newspapers; the perpetual sameness of everyday survival and world news; resignation and event; and not least of all, “Bag People” and the viewers of the installation, on whom the former turn their backs. In response to a question from an interviewer about whether the photographs merely depict “another world” and thus make use of a certain exoticism, Stilinovic´ replied: “That is not another world; these are only simple people trying to sell something. ... It is not exotic, only sad.” The newspaper clippings remind us that the people photographed and the people viewing them are all a part of, and participants in, the same political (world) conditions, even if their everyday stories do not intersect. Artist, born 1947, lives and works in Zagreb. |
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