Mladen Miljanović
Mladen Miljanović (1981, Zenica/BA) completed secondary school in Doboj. After secondary school, he attended the Reserve Officer Military School. In 2002 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka department of painting. He is one of few defining figures of the young generation of artists that emerged after the Balkan Wars, introducing a radically new art practice that points far beyond national boundaries. He attained international attention and acknowledgment already at a very young age: in 2009, he was granted the Henkel.Art. Award, which honors the most prominent young artists of Central and Eastern Europe. After that, he presented his work in a solo exhibition in one of the largest and most important museums of the region, the Mumok in Vienna. In 2013, Miljanović represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the 55th Venice Biennale; his project entitled The Garden of Delights was deemed one of the most notable pavilions by the international press. Recently he was the recipient of the White Aphrodite Award 2019 and participated 13th Cairo Biennale.
»The Didactic Wall was part of a Risk Change project exhibition titled Tense Present. It was a recent (2019) project that intervened and questioned possible art interventions into specific social circumstances. These circumstances are migration of people, and project The Didactic Wall was a research model on how art can act in a supportive and educative way. In collaboration with curator Irfan Hošić, the project was first developed as a site-specific project in City Gallery Bihać and later shown in Maribor as part Tense present exhibition. During the Maribor exhibition, there was an annex of work shown in the form of a billboard in BiH close to the Croatian/EU border. At the end of the Tense Present exhibition, the Risk Change jury decided to award The Didactic Wall with White Aphroid Award 2019.
My experience of project Risk Change is that it works as a regional platform that acts beyond the region’s borders. With a very promising title, it acts as a generator of pluralistic, critical, and socially asymmetric ideas that are offering another perspective on societies we live today. Through my personal experience of participation, Risk Change encourages locally critical and progressive ideas and puts spots on them as examples of critical thinking.«
– Mladen Miljanović