Prima Center Berlin

Zoran Todović confirmed his artistic status in local art and abroad by his huge linocuts of convincing expressive power and imagination, which attracted both the audience and the critics as a unique visual manuscript. Todović received many awards, but the Politika award (1992) should be mentioned separately since it was the first time that the prestigious recognition was awarded for an exhibition of prints. Although the author is primarily a graphic artist, he is simultaneously engaged in drawings, collage, painting, visual objects, installations, interactive communication. One could say that he endeavours to escape the traps of stereotype and accepts graphic art as an open system. In that system, so close to postmodernist principles, Todović experiments with the eff ect of certain creative problems in the fi eld of diff erent media. Therefore, the new exhibition of Zoran Todović could be read as a work in progress and its working title Speak Serbian so that the whole world can understand you becomes a forceful metaphor–reminder of all the misunderstandings we have had with the world (and ourselves). Ambient in its character, this exhibition is based on a dialogue between the author and his time, cultural, historic and political events, typical of a country in transition.
The mirror image of the artist and its self/refl ection initiate the feedback eff ect of mutual self/recognition. More precisely, Todović underlines an active (and matching) dialogue between the work and the beholder. He provokes the beholder with this interactive relationship, expects his/her reaction in line with you must have (and express) your own views in order to diff erentiate the right from the wrong, to identify the quality of your own being from the value of somebody else’s. The conceptual and visual representation of the exhibition was conceived for the Art Pavilion at Kalemegdan. It was divided into fi ve rooms, each of
them contextualizing certain phenomena in the form of mimicric situations and dislocated stations – Words, Flags, Picture 1991999, Find Your Face, “Serbian Eyeglasses”.
These fragments of historic and personal versions, in a time burdened with politics, challenge the national identity, the Cyrillic script, the artistic legacy for the future… The transformation of the gallery into the Red Wall, Blue Wall, Black Room, leads to passages of modifi ed visual materials. It is a sublimation of written words, mounted fl ags, photographs, prints, magazines, artists and visitors (recorded by a video camera and used in the next work). By repeating numerous diffi cult questions stored away by those who took part in or lived through the events of the 1990s, Todović interprets in the given dramatic cliche the symbols, codes and messages whose repetition recycles the historic, political and cultural legacies.
This personal diary without dates confronts the qualities of fragments and the whole, the Rooms of Darkness with the Rooms of Light, Painted Spaces, documentary parameters, the contention of the male and female principles, the ambivalent character of the ambience, spatial and conceptual stratifi cation of views and meanings. On his own behalf, the author spelled his project in Cyrillic–Latin script – ZORAN ТОДОВИЋ. This is more than a designer play with combinations of diff erent scripts, more an emphasis on the necessary communication links. The eyeglasses, spectacles, the leitmotif of this exhibition and the fetish–prop whose aid is indispensable, underline the historic experience and ideological optics.
Todović’s creative instinct, developed in the course of two decades, is contracted into a system of messages with many meanings, provocative questions and situations. So the present ambitious collage installation in the Pavilion at Kalemegdan is related to Todović’s
exhibition held in Čačak in 1992. After the principle of connected vessels, the logic of linking is repeated, so that the previous installation (Gallery Haos/Chaos, 2002) also began with words. The motto of the present exhibition, the notorious joke – Speak Serbian so that
the whole world can understand you – initiates with its humorous undertone a grave and essential question to which we do not have a proper answer. In fact, it provokes most profoundly and deepens the political context of the entire work, while its hermetic quality
and problematic ramifi cation make its reception diffi cult.

Ljiljana Ćinkul