Mladen Stilinović: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Films, Photographs, and Collages, 1973–1978

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The first solo exhibition in Bratislava by one of the crucial figures of European art – Mladen Stilinović (1947 — 2016) introduces his early works. At the time, it was not yet quite clear what direction he would take. Even so, it contains everything Stilinović would later so aptly express in his mature oeuvre. The driving force of these early works is in poetry and film, which enter into the explosively spontaneous visuality of his photomontages and collages on the one hand and the analytic precision of the photographic works on the other.
Between 1970 and 1977, the artist made around thirty short films and one feature-length film, which were presented at festivals of short and experimental films at the time of creation and later within the context of his exhibitions. As examples of his cinematic oeuvre, we selected for the exhibition four films shot on 8, 16, and 35 mm cameras. The films are digitised and three of them were also restored, so they can be presented publicly again after many years.

The interaction of words and images, the overlapping of everyday speech imbibed with politics, mediates a poetic line of thinking and points to a primary desire to use language non-ideologically. Poverty, social inequality, and the arrogance of those in power are Stilinović’s central themes. The factors that cause oppression and humiliation are the starting point for his interest in language – inversions, metaphors, wordplay, and irony. They have a liberating effect on anyone who can feel them.