Milica Tomić

On Love Afterwards investigates how art can open up and explore the topics of responsibility, visibility and injustice. In line with Tomić’s practice, the show considers exhibiting as a verb rather than the exhibition as subject. Her complex approach evolves around the object, but the focus is not on the object itself as much as on the negative space surrounding it, the space that enables it.

This means that the works contain complex layers that unfold in front of the viewer. When Tomić confronts us with the image or portrait of a woman it is never solely as a representation of female identity – instead, the artist exposes the political and social nuances which construct that identity. Similarly, she deals with the specificity of an image of war in a way that recognises that the image and its brutality go far beyond their depiction. Thus her works aim to fill in the blank space surrounding the missing image, while asking the viewer to think about the conditions of production and construction of such an image.

In her projects she has made a shift from individual to collective artistic practice, exploring and testing out new forms of collectivity. She is a founding member of the Yugoslav art and theory group Grupa Spomenik (or Monument Group) and founder of the interdisciplinary project and working group Four Faces of Omarska.

The exhibition offers an overview of her practice and presents a number of projects including 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).

Over the course of the exhibition, each of the works on show will be contextualised by an archive that intertwines with them. The role of this fluctuating archive is to invite viewers to explore and delve into a particular topic. At the same time, it situates the pieces exhibited here as part of a larger research process continuing in the background.

Milica Tomić was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and since 2014 has served as the Chair of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology in Austria. This retrospective exhibition offers an insight into her practice by means of selected projects. Her work continuously returns to the questions of absence, memory, political violence and social asymmetries. Tomić’s art practice is research-based and spans the mediums of photography, video, installation art, discursive, educational art, performance and socio-political engagement.