After being absent for ten years, Bosnia and Herzegovinа took part in the 55^th Venice Biennale with the exhibition “The Garden of Delights” by the Banja Luka-based artist Mlаden Miljаnović.

The initiative for Bosnia and Herzegovina to officially participate in the International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice came from the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska, which both organised and produced this year’s pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The participation model proposed by the MSURS was endorsed by the Ministry of Civil Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, following the approval of the relevant ministries from the Republic of Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Dr.Sc. Sаritа Vujković and Dr.Sc. Irfаn Hošić were appointed commissioners and project curators.

The pavilion was officially opened at Palazzo Mаlipiero on 30 May and attracted a great number of journalists, gallerists, critics and the wider professional public. The favourable reviews in the Italian press said it was one of the ten must-see Biennale exhibitions, and during the Biennale it was visited by around 50,000 visitors.

The project “The Garden of Delights” grew from a profoundly subversive art process that explored the socio-political, ethical, economic and cultural spheres of the Eastern European society the artist originally comes from. The concept of the project, as reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous mediaeval work of art “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (c. 1500), fully corresponded to the theme of this year’s Biennale, “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico”, of the Biennale curator Massimiliano Gioni.

Initially, Mlаden Miljаnović used Hieronymus Bosch’s mystical triptych, a piece of art still widely open to interpretation, as a model around which he designed his highly demanding work, realised using a medium and a technique not readily found across the range of contemporary art disciplines, drawing engraved in granite or marble slabs, as widely practiced by headstone carvers around the Balkans. The exhibition was the product of a long process of exploration that involved the collection and archiving of motifs carved in headstones. The articulation of these motifs resulted in artifacts that the newly realised work is essentially based on, as collective memory reconstructed. The idea of sepulchral representation built in the work and expressive of the aesthetics of the readymade was taken from a popular life context, and is dominated by elements of the deviant, sociological, ethnological and ritual

Mlаden Miljаnović was born in Zenica in 1981. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Academy of Arts in Bаnjа Luka. He is the winner of the Henkel Art.Award 09 (2009), the ZVONO Award for the Best Young Artist of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2007), and the Annual Award of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska for the best works in the annual exhibition of the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka (2006). He has taken part in a number of international exhibitions, such as the Busan Biennial, an international exhibition of video art in Busаn, South Korea (2008), Palazzo Forti, Veronа, Italy (2009), “Museum Service”, MUMOK, Museum Modern Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria, “Sarajevo Service” (2010) and the 53rd October Sаlon, Belgrade, Serbia (2011). In 2012, Miljanović had a solo exhibition titled “Lаku noć – Stаnje tijelа” at A+A Gallery in Venice, Italy, and in Februаry 2013 he showed his work at the MC Gallery in New York.

Commissioner: Dr.Sc. Sаritа Vujković

Curators: Dr.Sc. Sаritа Vujković, Dr.Sc. Irfаn Hošić

Organisation and production: Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska

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