Dušan Mandić: Private D.M. Die Welt ist Schön exhibition opened in Belgrade
The opening of the Dušan Mandić's exhibition Private D.M. Die Welt ist Schön was on Thursday 5 October at the Podroom Gallery in the Belgrade Cultural Centre. The exhibition, which was already on view at the City Art Gallery of Ljubljana from December 2013 to January 2014, is curated by Mateja Podlesnik. Mandić is deemed the first Slovenian artist who incorporated the art of graffiti from an urban/street environment into an interior space. In the early 1980s he, as one of the crucial ideologues of the Ljubljana's subcultural scene, marked the appearance of neo-avantgarde movements as alternatives to the established art system. Besides, we cannot overlook his merits in the foundation of the Irwin collective in 1983.
Private D.M. Die Welt ist Schön is a closer look into Mandić's early art production, while he was still working on his own, in the form of a repeat presentation of Welt ist Schönproject that was staged at the ŠKUC Gallery in Ljubljana in 1982. The series of images, interventions on standard postcards, crosses, and letters, were made during his one-year military service in Niš. In his own words, the exhibition is "a presentation of issues, which analyses a social situation and the position of the subject (Mandić himself) toward the ideological apparatus - the Yugoslav People's Army. Simultaneously, it is a displacement of the subject from a position of apparent control over the situation he inhibits and influences, to a position in which he finds himself wearing a uniform, becoming nothing but a cog in the mechanism of the state's totalitarian machine."
More about the exhibition.