Aleksandra Domanović

Not simply SMS-speak, the title of Aleksandra Domanović’s current solo show, “From yu to me,” is a shorthand way to describe edifice trended into obsolescence. In 2010, Yugoslavia’s national top-level domain, .yu, was dissolved, and the independent Montenegro christened its own distinct top-level domain: .me. Cast aside, .yu as an administrative autonomy is now but a ghost of itself, alongside the former republic and the monuments that accredited its authority. In Domanović’s show, two forms of public space in the Balkans—politically motivated architecture and Internet structures—are merged in an attempt to to suss out their shared attributes.

In her ongoing series of “Paper Stacks,” 2009–, a stream of publicly shared images of seaside holiday resorts turned refugee camps and football games gone riotous are dissected into pixels, printed full bleed onto the razor-thin edges of A4 and A3 sheets piled into delicate stelae. An image is formed on the lateral sides of the stacks through the accumulation of thousands of sheets. In another room, the pure modernist white multiples of Bogdan Bogdanović’s 1961 Partisan’s Necropolis are slenderized into Prilep Nymph, 2012, a playful Styrofoam sculpture finished in turquoise Tadelakt. In 19:30, 2010–11, dozens of 1990s-era Yugoslav nightly news jingles, remixed by DJs into techno beats, set the tempo of a dual-channel video juxtaposing the original newscast intros with scenes of recent raves throughout the former republic. All the while, the crisp narrator of Turbo Sculpture, 2012, explains how a collective identity crisis led Hollywood stars and other heroes of the Western world—Rocky, Bruce Lee, and Johnny Depp—to become public monuments throughout the Balkans, as JPEGs pile atop each other on the cinema-size screen.

Eschewing nostalgia, Domanović continues the displacement of already stranded symbols, analytically melding them into a means to decipher the Balkans’ chaotically coded present. Notwithstanding the press release’s fallacious claim that a visit to Domanović’s website is more productive than a studio visit, the artist successfully intertwines forms of public space in such a way that they flow seamlessly.