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Rat's Manifesto, 2022
c-print on steel, wood, rubber granulate, dimensions variable

photographs: Žaklina Antonijević, Vladimir Frelih, Mišo Vojnović

The work Rat's Manifesto consists of ten steel plates of different dimensions hung on the wall so that they create two strings of images. Alongside these images, five black wooden objects are displayed in space and filled with rubber granulate. The mentioned strings (each comprised of five plates) contain digitally printed sentences, chemical formulas, and signs. A large part of the respective work's meaning lies in its title, precisely, in the word manifesto which the artist takes as a starting point for the content printed on the plates. A manifesto is a solemn proclamation or an act of a specific literary, artistic, or political movement – it is a distinct statement of an idea about a certain societal change. In the work Rat's Manifesto, precisely in wall segments, different language systems are used (morphemes, numbers, symbols) to, through narrative strings, observe the problems of contemporary living spaces, thereby also considering the individual that inhabits them. The form of this discourse is deliberately caricatured using red and black color variations in words or parts of motives, poetic statements, and symbols like the chemical formula for rodent poison. In the end, these two strings function as a fictive, “revolting statement” against the growing disappearance of private living spaces and the widespread survival mentality brought by the time of prominent capitalistic trends.

 

Like the rat symbolism integrated into the printed images, a series of objects in space resemble stylized rodent heads complementing the subtle escapism paradigm of the whole work. The objects are vaguely tectonic in shape and perhaps sepulchral due to their black color and their sedimented content (raw rubber) which produces an intense smell. Here, the artist continues his commentary on living conditions expanding it to ruminations on the loss of places in certain cities. Therefore, black objects may function as small models for a fictive living space of the works “revolutionary”, or they can be interpreted as monuments to spaces – timeless, forgotten, and filled with debris.  

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