Milica Tomić. On Love Afterwards

The survey exhibition offers insight into the practice of artist Milica Tomić. Born in Belgrade, Tomić has been Chairwoman of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology since 2014. In her work, she repeatedly revisits questions of absence, memory, political violence and social asymmetries. Her practice is research-based and includes work in the media of photography, video, installation art, discursive, pedagogical art, performance and socio-political engagement.

The exhibition On Love Afterwards is an attempt to open up and address issues of responsibility, visibility and injustice through art. Together with her practice, she considers exhibiting as a verb rather than a subject. Her complex artistic practice revolves around the object, but the focus is not on the object itself, rather on the negative space that surrounds it, the space that enables it. For this reason, Milica Tomić’ work reveals complex layers that unfold in front of the viewer. When she directs the gaze to an image or portrait of a woman, it is never the mere representation of female identity; rather the artist lays bare political and social nuances that construct that very identity. Similarly, Tomić deals with the specificity of images of war by recognising that an image of war and its brutality goes far beyond its descriptive representation. For this reason, she attempts in her works to fill in the empty space around the missing image. She invites viewers to reflect on the conditions of production and construction of such an image.

Her projects have led her to develop from the individual to the collective artistic practice, to explore and try out new forms of collectivity. Tomić is a founding member of the Yugoslav art/theory group Grupa Spomenik (or Monument Group) and is involved in the interdisciplinary project and working group Four Faces of Omarska.

The exhibition provides insight into her work and concentrates on projects such as Ungelöst XY (1997), I am Milica Tomić (1998), The Portrait of My Mother (1999), Alone (2001), Reading Capital (2004), One day, Instead of One Night, a Burst of Machine-Gun Fire will Flash, if Light Cannot Come Otherwise (2009), Last Letter (2010), Container, Reconstruction of a Crime (2004–2011) and others. In the whole exhibition, each of the works exhibited is contextualised by means of the archive, which is interwoven with the pieces on show.