Native from Bosnia and working in Berlin, multitalented artist and performer Mila Panić is currently exhibiting her work at the East Contemporary gallery in Milan… until April 19th… “Madness”!
Red lights… “Madness” bombed in black painting on the window of the gallery… the tone is set! It is not an exhibition but an immersion into a mind in reflection… words, sentences, photographs agitate the space like calling out the viewer.
Black and white pictures contrast with the vivid colors… red lettering like graffiti or blue neons… light and shadow… paradoxes and oxymorons. There is a sense of accumulation and, at the same time, dispersion… a complex order of recognizing ourselves… our identity. “La felicità mi tormenta” (Happiness torments me) is written like a protest and affirmation… maybe an answer to today’s general injunction of being happy. Happiness… is it just pretending… showing a smile on a face and sharing it with the whole world doesn’t mean being happy… it can be torment… a mask on reality.
The photographs are even more powerful as they have different sizes and expressions… forming visual sentences and punctuations. The face of the artist herself, as so many self portraits, resonate into the room as an echo and sometimes a scream. It’s an intimacy of the instant and the display of an identity… always the same… always different.The overwriting in black and red (like blood)… gives voice to the picture and to the artist… an additional layer of poetry and often violence (“Hurts so good”, . A direct conversation immediately takes place with the viewer… as feeling a real presence. It’s the madness of earring voices in our head even in the silence of pictures. And as the viewer looks at this depiction of the self, the introspection of the artist becomes contagious and he starts to wonder about his own existence and his relation to the exterior world. It’s a life in motion.
This motion is even emphasized by the presence of two tires. The white tire is engraved with a sentence that is being written when rolling on a white powder… “here and there being…”. It could be an endless way, an endless ride, an endless poetry and life… without boundaries and never belonging to any specific location. It’s a sense of pure freedom. Another black tire is filled with goods and products… questioning the impact and trajectories of our consumption and our needs… to find happiness? A taste of luxury and fake… perfumes or cigarettes… generating money and traffic. Hidden in a tire like a contraband and counterfeit… the bottles don’t have the same smell after all… and so does the “branded” happiness… which turns to madness!
More info :
ABSTRACT MIMESIS 