Ana Ereš
TO SCULPTURE, WITH LOVE - THE VENETIAN PROPOSALS OF RADOŠ ANTONIJEVIĆ

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Starting from a thorough understanding of specific relationships towards time and place held both by sculpture and the Venetian exhibition, Radoš Antonijević developed several concepts of artistic proposals about the possibilities for sculpture in the Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia at the Venice Biennale from 2015 to the present day. These proposals, as sketches and maquettes, were created for the specific needs of public competitions announced for the application of artistic proposals for exhibitions in the national pavilion in Venice – they are unambiguously defined by the context of the Biennale with regard to the given thematic and programmatic framework of its central show expected to be the goal of the answers, but also with regard to the already mentioned temporal and spatial compactness and uniqueness imposed by the Venetian manifestation. Therefore, such proposals/projects can be understood as separate, specific artistic gestures in the opus of Radoš Antonijević characterized by processuality, referentiality, and the possibility of un-realisation (or impossibility of realisation) as “the imposed” frameworks of sculptural action within and against the given place (Serbian national pavilion, the Giardini, Venetian Biennale, Venice) and time (projections of contemporaneity and compact history of the exhibition event). Since those are proposals for large-scale sculptures these projects also open up the question of the problems of production and execution of sculptures stipulated by non-artistic proposition and for that reason remain on the level of ideas executed in a scaled-down format of the maquette. The transference of the drawings and maquettes from the artist’s studio and competition requirements into a gallery/exhibition space, Radoš Antonijević also problematises the relationship between artistic production and exhibition practice, also institutional mechanisms of valorisation and translations of art from the anonymity of a studio into the public sphere.
Four exhibition projects placed into the exhibition space of Gallery Rima in Kragujevac: The Cycle of Kosovo – 101 Years Later (2015), Stand Erect in Your Place (2017), On Beneficial and Damaging Effects of History on Life (2019) and Worthy of Happiness (2022) possess several common characteristics: in space they are realised as sculptures and sculptural installations of big dimensions; they insist on physical presence and the material quality of sculpture; they are executed in materials (raw clay and tent-cloth) which are not stable – they change their performance in time (in specific atmospheric conditions clay becomes dry, cracks and perishes, while the tent cloth can be folded/packed and taken to another place); they evolve from an unambiguous closeness to cultural and historic narratives - sculptures can destabilise their mechanisms of monumentality inside a certain space. Each project starts from forms that visualise the carefully chosen ideas and places from the past, that had overcome actuality in their contemporaneity and become recognisable spaces of historic experience. The Temple of Vidovdan by Ivan Meštrović (unrealised) a form of monumentality of the idea about unity and the historic desire of South Slavic nations for liberation, the monastery of Visoki Dečani, a memorable form of Serbian mediaeval tradition in the encounter with Byzantine and Romanesque cultural spheres, and the form of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade that realises the concept of modernist and socialist emancipation of the Yugoslav (cultural) space in a specific place of the riverbank in New Belgrade, are confronted as structures made from tent-cloth in the exhibition project of The Cycle of Kosovo – 101 Years Later, accentuating the points of intensive coexistence of great ideas in politics and art in the crucial periods when the new outlines of (historic) identities were created. National histories are the pretext of the project On Beneficial and Damaging Effects of History on Life where two mega-structures are brought into dialogue: the clay bust of President Josip Broz Tito and the tent of Meštrović’s Temple of Vidovdan, provoking the confrontation of the two monuments of two Yugoslav ideologies within the space of the pavilion that belonged to Yugoslavia realised in both political forms. In his projects, Stand Erect in Your Place and Worthy of Happiness, Radoš Antonijević reflects the confrontation with historic compactness of the Venice Biennale in the spaces of great narratives of the past. In the first case, he maps the geographic and historic space bordered by the mountains of Olympus, the Mount of Sinai and Ararat in order to create a (fragile) symbolic topography of the cradle of European and Christian civilisation, but also a contemporary horizon of military conflicts and an unstoppable migration of people which he – again in the material and format of a tent – relocates into a safe zone of Venetian Giardini. The project Worthy of Happiness is a monumental tent executed after the architecture of the Baroque church Santa Maria della Salute, which Venice had dedicated to Virgin Mary after the great plague in the first half of the seventeenth century; the artist confronts this with a sculpture of the iconic scene of the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, showing the moment when his wife Jacqueline mounts the rear part of the car in an attempt to avoid death. Life, just like sculpture, seeks to avoid transience.

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