Robert Gligorov: Termination Shock
May 21 - 28, 2007

concept and text by Dejan Atanackovic

Collaboration / Support
City of Belgrade
Galleria Pack, Milano
Italian Cultural Institute
La Corte Arte Contemporanea

Works by Robert Gligorov were presented in the streets of Belgrade, as a series of public installations on 18 illuminated advertising billboards of various sizes. A map with all locations of the works, displayed in a vast downtown area, was distributed during the opening.

Mr. Alessandro Merola, Ambassador of Italy in Belgrade, inaugurated the event May 21, at the Italian Cultural Institute. The day after the opening, Gligorov held a talk on his work at the Belgrade University of Arts.

The show was given support by the City of Belgrade, Gallery Pack in Milan and the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade. The works were displayed on the billboards of a Belgrade company Alma Quattro.

All photos of the works were taken by Tanja Krstevski.

[excerpt from a text by Dejan Atanackovic]
In Robert Gligorov's works, the body is shown at the moment of reaching its own limits - of pain, resilience, metamorphosis, contamination with the Other - in the scenes that make it look inseparable from its immediate communicational surroundings. It is exposed to the forces which come from the nature and language, confirming how intertwined these are, making language and nature equally tangible environments, in which the body acquires its final shape. The body undergoes strange metamorphoses in contact with familiar organic structures: edible stuff, animals or plants appearing as disconcerting reminders of a childhood fear or childhood curiosity (which often is one and the same). By exposing to view the unexpected bowel contents, or displaying a cross-section of flesh and skin looking like a box of packaged foods, Gligorov links the bodily forms with the external organic world, and the result of these symbioses is as disturbing as the logic linking them together: tactile quality, texture and color become a blasphemous commentary on the importance and meaning of the body, now reduced to its seemingly less relevant, estheticized qualities. Devaluation of the body or, quite to the contrary, adding it special value? This question reflects reality in an equally problematic way, as does the extreme utilization of the body in the acts of esthetic surgery and suicidal terrorism. In fact, the surgeries which the body undergoes in Gligorov's art are an obvious evocation of the fashion trends which, like premeditated violence, treat the body as a luxury, insufficiently one's own, but also a nuisance that can be eliminated or substituted in a number of ways. But at the same time, just like the interventions dictated by fashion, the surreal treatments of the body in Gligorov's work are an expression of subjectization of an already existing linguistic reality, which uses the body as sculpting material.