UNTITLED (COVERING), 2009-19
Multi-piece wall installation, newsprint, sprayed silver
Sladjan Nedeljkovic is interested on many levels in the mechanisms of visual narratives and the workings of the calculated interaction between texts and images in the print media. In his work Untitled (Covering), newspaper sheets are covered with silver paint, leaving only the photographs intact. The texts, layout and media information (name, date and section of the newspaper) are sealed beneath a thin layer, buried under a slightly shimmering coat which at the same time ennobles the "cheap" surface quality of the newsprint. Yet what do the images relate without the accompanying text which their original function is to strengthen, to emotionalize? What connexions reveal themselves by the means of textual deslagging and contextual emancipation?
Through a simple, decided gesture, Nedeljkovic puts the focus on central aspects of media reporting and information production, such as the inherent power of images to call up associations and establish references, and their recontextualization potential by means of deliberate juxtapositions with other visual productions or texts. The images "tell" their story. It is left to the observers to understand the space surrounding them as a free space or a void, which they may fill using their faculty of association and their pictoral memory, or leave empty.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at Museum of Art Lucerne, 2009
Photos: Andri Stadler
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at General Public Berlin, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at Artport showroom Berlin, 2009
On the walls: UNTITLED (COVERING), 2009
each 57 x 80 cm, neswprint, sprayed silver.
On the floor: CONSTALLATION, 2009, height 200 cm
Newsapaper images, photocopies, computerprints, postcards and photos on MDF
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at Galerie im Saalbau, Berlin, 2014
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at Kunstverein Ebersberg, 2017
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at Kunstverein Würzburg, 2017
--------------------------------------------------------------------
View of the exhibition at The National Museum in Szczecin - Museum of Contemporary Art, 2022