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Vladimir Miladinović’s new exhibition, The Notebook, will be open to the public from Saturday, 6 June.

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“The Notebook”  is a work based on Ratko Mladic’s war diary – a document from the trial against him before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

The monumental work, on which the artist has worked for the past few years, consists of a series of carefully drawn pages of a diary prepared for the needs of the trial. The diary was found in 2010 in Belgrade during a search conducted by the ICTY investigation team. Missed by previous searches, a fake wall was found in one of the houses where Mladic was hiding, a large number of his personal diaries he kept during the war in the 1990s were found behind the wall, as well as many audio and video cassettes, photographs and documents testifying to the war actions.

In order for this document to become relevant evidence usable in court, it had to be carefully prepared beforehand. The court had to hire a team of graphologists, witnesses / experts whose task was to translate the text written by Mladic. Their task was to use their authority to stand behind such a translation and claim what is actually written there. Every letter, every line had to be carefully converted into computer text, readable by the bureaucratic audience of the court. A step further, the court had to translate the material adapted in this way into English in order to be legible for the international composition of the court panel. Only in this way could the diary be used as evidence.

In his work, Miladinović uses such an adapted document and carefully draws each each letter by hand, page by page of all four hundred pages of the diary. This process raises a number of questions. What makes certain material adequate for a legal bureaucratic forum and what is the role of an expert witness in that process? What is the role of artistic imagination in the processes of dealing with the traumatic past? What are the limits of archives and archival material that has already served its purpose before the court?

For many years, Vladimir Miladinović has been following his daily routine in which he is dedicated to archival research of those historical periods around which it is difficult to reach a broader social consensus. By transferring the collected material in the form of a drawing, faithfully redrawing the collected material in the ink-wash technique, the artist creates a series of works through which he tries to create a personal relationship with the offered material. He has received several acknowledgments for his work. He won the award of the 53rd October Salon, as well as the main award of the fund for drawing “Vladimir Veličković”.

The exhibition, whose production was supported by the Belgrade forumZFD, will be open until the end of July.

Segments from the text for the catalogue:

Aesthetic Contestation and the Archive: Vladimir Miladinović’s The Mladić Diaries

Dr. Henry Redwood – King`s College London

[…] In drawing inspiration from the Mladic Diaries from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s archive, Vladimir not only challenges the logic of the ICTY’s archive, but the archival drive more generally as he opens the archive to new encounters and new imaginative possibilities. This is made possible, as the following suggests, through the aesthetic politics located in Vladimir’s practice.

This practice revolves around this question of archival power. His work meticulously reproduces the archival records of silenced or contested aspects of the former Yugoslavia’s past in ink wash. This draws attention to the logics and drivers that led to the exclusion of these records from popular imagination – frequently linked to the systems and processes that contributed to the occurrence of violence in the first place, such as nationalism and the shift from socialist to capitalist economies. In resituating these records, Vladimir alters boundaries of ‘the limits’ in the present, or, following Ranciere, disrupts the ‘disruption of the sensible’ which renders certain knowledges ‘common sense’ whilst other are made illegitimate. His work has drawn on numerous archives, including newspaper archives and museums archives, and within these his practice has focused on numerous different types of documents, such as lists, maps, posters, pamphlets and photographs. However, a reoccurring archive in Vladimir’s work, and which underpins The Notebook, is the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)’s archive.

[…] Whilst this approach defines much of Vladimir’s work, this is equally key to The Notebook. This renders the process through which evidence is produced in the courtroom visible, and also turns the logic of this process against itself. In re-drawing by hand each page of the notebook, Vladimir returns the evidence to its original state – as a hand written and personal object. But in the reproduction, the gap between the personal reproduction, – gesturing towards the notebooks original form – jars against the attempts to tame the pages of this as evidence which remain visible within the digitised reproduction (then reproduced by Vladimir). The oddly neat circles, the double underlined passages, all of which evidence the courts concern with objectivity, authenticity and accuracy, are all reproduced in Vladimir’s work in a manner that puts a mirror up to that process to show it for its peculiarity. But in putting these aspects of the diary front and centre of the work, it shows the limits of the court’s that mode of knowledge production and ultimately, its inability to tame the memory of violence. This is perhaps made particularly stark in those moments when the digitised version reads ‘indecipherable’. More than this, the work – which occupies a 50 square meters wall – overwhelms the viewer in a way that also gestures towards the difficult nature of processing and dealing with the past.