THE FUTURE, FROM THE BEGINNING • Nemanja Nikolić

Art Gallery, Knez Mihailova 6
29. 6 – 5.8. 2023.
Opening on 29th June at 19:00

THE FUTURE, FROM THE BEGINNING

NEMANJA NIKOLIĆ

Film is the starting point of Nemanja Nikolić’s art practice, which could be described as artistic research in the area of complex possibilities of networking cinematic and traditional art discourses. With a series of intermedia works, where he combines cinematic elements with drawing, sound and text, and remediation of film rhythms in the field of the geometric abstraction of traditional paining, Nikolić’s art practice builds, as noted by art theorist Stevan Vuković, on the tradition of “avant-garde practice of Yugoslav artists with a focus on experimental research in the field of moving images.”

Nikolić’s most complex intermedia project so far, The Plot, presented within the exhibition The Future, from the Beginning, was created over the past three years in a long process of gradual and patient building of a collection of 5,000 drawings of sequences and frames taken from more than a hundred films produced during the Cold War period (1947–1989/91) in the studios of major film production companies of the Western World, primarily the United States and United Kingdom. This corpus of drawings on paper and black boards, done in the ink technique, with the occasional use of charcoal and chalk, was incorporated – by means of montage – into 168 animated sequences that make up the animated sound film The Plot.

Nemanja Nikolić (1987) graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Painting Department, in 2010 and completed his PhD studies at the same faculty in 2019. Nemanja is the initiator of the U10 Art Space, founded in 2012 in Belgrade, focused on the presentation of the young art scene and its recognition. Since 2018 he has worked at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, currently as an associate professor.

THE PLOT, animated movie by Nemanja Nikolić
animacija / drawing animation, 9’ 43’’
Composer: Pavle Popov
Video-editing: Nemanja Petrović
Photographs: Nina Ivanović
Technical support: Jovan Jović, Velimir Popović, Nina Knežević