Ana Milenkovic
We Will TAke Your Technology and Your Money
27 October - 15 December 2023
Opening: Friday 27 October 5 - 9pm
Down, down in the basement
we hear the sound of machines.
And I, I’m driving in circles
Come to my senses sometimes
- David Byrne Girlfriend is Better (Stop Making Sense)
School Gallery is pleased to present We Will Take Your Technology And Your Money, an exhibition by Serbian artist Ana Milenkovic. We Will Take Your Technology And Your Money features three new paintings drawn from press images representing individual success, political power, and high culture. The paintings are displayed against blown up stills from Adam Curtis’ 2015 documentary Bitter Lake. Milenkovic offers a fragmented perspective, focusing on aspects that could otherwise be irrelevant or overlooked, creating alternate zoomed-in compositions of familiar imagery.
For Bitter Lake Adam Curtis provides a politically driven monologue over cleverly stitched together BBC archive footage creating a seamless audio-visual masterpiece. One of the narratives focuses on past governments from Russia and the West, highlighting their continued and largely failing interventions in Afghanistan and the simplified stories created by the west about Militant Islam. The opening monologue states “Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow”. In a similar way We Will Take Your Technology And Your Money offers a fragmented collage of the artists simplified interpretation of loaded media imagery – creating her own alternative narrative. Milenkovic was inspired by Cutis’ ability to compare grandiose ideas with their mundane realisation.
A further reading list has been provided by Milenkovic to share the literary, philosophical, and musical influences that fed the realisation of these works. These are more clues, meant as triggers, references, or ear worms in a maieutic manner. Maieutic comes from ‘maieutikos’, the Greek word for ‘of midwifery’ and is a teaching style synonymous with the Socratic Method of helping a person to bring forth and become aware of latent ideas or memories. Like in midwifery, you can only be assisted in giving birth to your understanding, something you must inevitably do yourself.
Ana Milenkovic (b. 1988, Belgrade) lives and works in London. She holds an MFA from Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London, as well as MFA and BA from Faculty of Fine Art, University of Arts in Belgrade. Milenkovic was the recipient of UAL/Clifford Chance Sculpture Award, Griffin Art Prize and Prize for Innovation from the Milos Bajic Fund. She is a studio artist at Studio Voltaire, London.
Solo exhibitions include Quietism, Brooke Benington, London; Shrouded Light, School Gallery, London; Grimoire, Three Works, Scarborough; Rosshalde, Ravnikar Gallery Space, Ljubljana; The Difficult Path, School Gallery, London; The Gods Must be Crazy, Novembar Gallery, Belgrade; One Work, Aqbar Space, London; Selected Paintings, PayneShurvell, London; Arcadia, Clifford Chance LLP, London.
Selected group exhibitions include Becoming a Body of Water, David Kovats Gallery, London; The Holy Grail, OHSH Projects, London; Intertwined Histories, Kristin Hjelleg jerde Gallery, London; The Room of One’s Own, The Koppel Project Central, London; Night Realms, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh; Innocence, Below Grand, New York; Griffin Art Prize Exhibition, Griffin Art Gallery, London.