Marko Lulić

Vienna, 1972

Bearing in mind the European historical context since World War I, which saw the consolidation of modernism in its most varied forms, Marko Lulic produces videos that register performances in spaces with monumental works of sculpture or architecture. These elements evoke the ideological and aesthetic diversity of progressive forms of the modern found in distinct ways in socialist and capitalist nations.

The artist investigates this repertoire in Eastern Europe and presents some largely uncelebrated and little photographed samples. Kosmaj Monument (2015) and Proposal for a Workers’ Monument (2014) are two films that promote, each in its own way, intersections between monument and dance, a static memory and an attempt to understand it through the body and movement. Shot on Kosmaj mountain, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), and in Berne, Switzerland, the works show how dancers, sometimes improvising and sometimes performing choreographies, can activate spaces and bring to light their historical, architectonic and social particularities. The body can conjure up possible responses to what collective memory chooses to forget or remember.

[D.M.]