Vladimir Miladinović


Nondescript Places


22/01 — 08/03/2025


Official history, which shapes historical memory within a given cultural or national context, is proven to be a fragile and flexible concept. Through tendentious historicising, public opinion can be manipulated, repression relativised and the people instrumentalised for new conflicts and sacrifices. In his artistic practice, Vladimir Miladinović analyses the complex mechanisms that shape public discourse and historical memory. He focuses on the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s in order to provide an insight into the details of particular war crimes that were carried out in the name of nationalist ideology. Numerous massacres, ethnic cleansings and genocides were committed at that time, many of which have not been fully investigated to this day.

With his drawings, paintings and “readymade” objects, Miladinović highlights selected events that have shaped (and continue to shape) the lives of so many people. In a veristic manner, he depicts the headlines of newspapers reporting on the war in the former Yugoslavia and manually reproduces images of mass graves and archival documents. Even though he presents the hard evidence – with the awareness that evidence can be easily manipulated as well – of conflicts, massacres, propaganda, hate speech campaigns and political agreements, his works do not focus on bare data, but mainly reflect his own astonishment and disgust at the recorded horrors, which are still inadequately represented in the public discourse. To this day, the ideologies of former warring sides have not changed significantly.

With his works the artist perhaps raises some fundamental questions about so-called “human nature” and the capacity of an individual to commit atrocities in the name of a nation, state, religion or simply personal interest. Apart from the ideologists and planners of realpolitik, who often perceive the world and its inhabitants as a game of Monopoly, pogroms and political murders cannot happen without their direct enforcers and executioners. So how do ordinary people become persecutors, rapists and murderers? How does a community, which has lived for decades in comfortable cohesion, tightly connected and intertwined, end up in a brutal civil war? What are the mechanisms that can lead to such unscrupulous reckoning and killing? 

In her book War of Images (2014), photographer and researcher Sandra Vitaljić writes that every war, including the one in the former Yugoslavia, begins with a public discourse of hate that demonises an adversary and emphasises one’s own victimhood and determination to defend oneself. Only when the adversary has been completely dehumanised, transformed into the embodiment of an unscrupulous and bloodthirsty beast, are ordinary people willing to take an active role in mass violence. Victims always have the right to defend themselves, which is why hate propaganda is, as a rule, the harbinger of upcoming war.

These phenomena are rather universal. In the first quarter of the 21st century, the world remains entrapped in the grip of nation-states and empires that feed on nationalism, patriotism, a sense of superiority and deep antagonism towards the Other. Despite the complete dispersion of the media landscape, the mechanisms of propaganda still function very effectively. For many decades now, people have been subjected to the influence of the advertising industry, which has been using a cacophony of messages to compel individuals to desire and to spend. In the same way that an individual is susceptible to commercial messages, he or she can also be susceptible to political propaganda, and that is one reason why the present-day is still marked by media blockades, propaganda campaigns, nationalism and racism. Although a more harmonious international policy began to emerge after World War II, based on the right to self-determination of peoples and on the principles of overall social justice, it soon gave way to more sinister realpolitik of the superpowers and their satellites. Despite the decolonisation of the world, the former imperial powers refuse to withdraw from their former colonies, attempting to control them by economic or military means.

In a broader perspective, the war in the former Yugoslavia is only small fragment of the history of the turbulent 20th century, a marginal event within the immense geopolitical shifts that depolarised and ideologically standardised the world after the end of the Cold War. However, the way it was conceived and how it unfolded showed the fragility of civil society’s supervision over the functioning of institutions. In Yugoslavia, all control mechanisms failed and gave way to nationalism, individualism and hatred. But the question remains: Why do people identify with nationality and religion to such an extent that they are willing to kill and to die for them? 

Civil wars have no victors. Except for a few war profiteers, they usually devastate entire populations that have invariably succumbed to a frenzied nationalism – which can lead to a vicious circle. Historian Dubravka Stojanovic, speaking on the Agelast podcast (25 February 2024), stated that defeats and sacrifices are (in the long term) far more important for nationalist ideology than victories and heroes. She described the current sociopolitical situation in Serbia in precisely those terms: as a country that is slowly, but inadequately, coming to terms with its own role in the past civil wars. A large part of Serbian society has simply accepted the dominant public discourse, which has prevailed since the late 1980s, and homogenised itself in the role of a collective victim – a suffering nation that has been abandoned by (almost) all its allies, and left completely alone against the whole world.

Miladinović’s works also focus on the Serbian side of the coin in past wars, and the crimes associated with them. He primarily aims to reckon with the historical memory of his own cultural milieu, which often replaces confrontation with the past and acceptance of responsibility with the trauma caused by the loss of ethnic territory. All the successor states of Yugoslavia face similar problems when it comes to acceptance of responsibility in the processes of transition into new nation-states. Everywhere there is a tendency to shift responsibility to others, even if they may actually be victims. In Slovenia, the mass erasure of the non-ethnic population from the register of citizens is perceived by many as a logical and just reckoning with those who did not show sufficient loyalty to the nation. An absurdity has taken place: the new-found democracy has excluded people who did not (democratically) agree with the new political order. In Croatia, the killing and persecution on both warring sides was justified as self-defence. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is still a matter of counting which side started the violence first, in which district, and who is the original victim; in other words, who had an unquestionable right to self-defence by any means. The mass murder of the prisoners of war and civilians in Srebrenica is justified by the defence of Serbian soil and by revenge for their own victims. In Serbia, some perpetrators of killings have become victims who have had to leave their homes.

Miladinović’s works are opening up a number of hidden and forgotten episodes of recent history. In the past, he made drawings of selected pages from the diary of the commander of the army of Republika Srpska, Ratko Mladić, which served as evidence in his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. He recreated the front pages of several newspapers during the period of war in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, thus demonstrating the uncompromising propaganda and hate speech of all parties involved, as well as analysing geopolitical tendencies of the global superpowers. He made veristic depictions based on the photographs of the excavation of mass graves at Batajnica, near Belgrade, where the Serbian army and police buried the bodies of slaughtered Albanian civilians in order to cover up the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. He has also drawn and painted landscapes of particular locations marked by traumatic events. Although these pictures may appear ordinary and homely at first sight, they become – when their context is revealed – sinister images of human cruelty.

His works can therefore be perceived as distinctly direct, informative and explicit, depicting archival images and texts, while at the same time they can be seen as a metaphorical reflection on the crude bureaucracy that is necessary for both the investigation of war crimes as well as for the conception and execution of these war crimes. Even in the absence of direct images of death and destruction, which are replaced by reports and statistics, the works remain exceptionally crude and haunting. But it is precisely in these horrific statistics that the essence of industrialised war and inflammatory propaganda lies.


Vladimir Miladinović (1981) lives and works in Belgrade. He graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade and has completed doctoral level courses in the department of Art and Media Theory at the University of Arts, Belgrade. He has been working as an independent artist since 2007. He was a member of the Working Group “Four Faces of Omarska” an art/theory group that questions memorial production strategies. Miladinović’s main interests lie with the politics of remembering, media manipulation and the creation and reinterpretation of the history. His work engages with war and post-war trauma. It deals with media, forensics, political and ethical identification and presentation of war crimes, but also with current transitional ideologies of denial and erasure. It questions how media and institutions in the post-war societies create public space, consequently shaping collective memory. He is using art as a forum to create a counter-public sphere that raises questions about war, media propaganda, manipulation of narrative, historical responsibility and intellectual engagement. 

He was the laureate of the 53rd October Salon Award in Belgrade and won the award from “Vladimir Veličković” fond. He has exhibited widely across Europe, including at the SMBA - Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Artium - Basque Museum Centre of Contemporary Art (Vitoria, Spain), Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich, Germany), Salzburger Künstverein (Salzburg, Austria), FreiraumQ21 - Museumsquartier (Vienna, Austria), CACT-Thessaloniki Center Of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, Greece) The Exchange (London, UK) etc.


TEXT: Miha Colner







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