Representing a divided place: the artistic-military practice of Mladen Miljanović

Abstract

This essay on the work of the Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanović, born in Zenica, Yugoslavia, in 1981, is wrought around an account of the divided place in which his art is mobilised. Following a short military term, Miljanović enrolled at the Academy of Arts, in Banja Luka, where he still lives. A potent opposition to a divisive ethno-nationalist politics ever-present in the post-conflict, post-socialist, transition era of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Miljanović deploys what he calls an artistic-military practice. Incorporating cartographic and military surveying techniques learnt at a reserve officer military school, Miljanović deconstructs his own soldierly past and interrogates, through his artistic-military practice, an ethno-nationalist militarised Bosnia-Herzegovina. I focus in the main here on the artist’s recent attempt to represent post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, a granite triptych entitled, The Garden of Delights.