BIO

https://www.tanyaleighton.com/artists/aleksandra-domanovic

WORK AT THE EXHIBTION

Turbo Sculpture (Epilogue), 2024
HD video with sound, 30′

Aleksandra Domanović’s Turbo Sculpture (Epilogue) (2024) examines the relatively unknown phenomenon of celebrity monuments that became popular in the Western Balkans in the early 21st century, such as the statue of Bruce Lee in Bosnia and Herzegovina erected in 2005 or that of Rocky Balboa in Serbia in 2007. In an essayistic style, the film explores how celebrity-monument-building became a vehicle for these countries to distance themselves from the memory of the Yugoslav Wars. As Domanović reveals, the trend’s origins can be linked to the rise of turbo folk, a hybrid of Western techno and local traditional music that became influential during the ethnic cleansing campaigns of Slobodan Milošević and his co-conspirators. By tracing a genealogy of turbo folk across music, architecture, and civic monuments, Domanović argues that the music is not merely a genre but also a nationalist-aesthetic impulse that survives to this day in the Western Balkans in the form of celebrity-monument-building – a phenomenon that allows descendants of the perpetrators of the massacres to willfully forget the wars while also channel their nationalism through the vehicle of a putatively apolitical artform. In this way, Turbo Sculpture (Epilogue) (2024) is not merely a deep dive into the humorous story of post-Yugoslavia’s appropriation of Western camp, it is a study of its nations’ attempts to promote historical amnesia.