My practice is rooted in working with the image, but from there it encompasses a variety of time-based media. I am specifically interested in the role of vision in the construction of meaning and the production of power following the digital turnover. In a wider sense, the content of my work is concerned with how perception is organized; exploring issues of dissolution, fragmentation and disappearance.

An underlying presence in my work is my own experience of war and displacement, however this is never transferred into explicitly autobiographical elements. Instead, I reflect on this more broadly through my engagements with topics such as vision and representation, violence and visibility; how they relate to one another and how these systems influence our understanding of what is considered (f)actual and virtual. This interest holds root in the fact that my lived experience of the (1992-1995) Bosnian war has significantly been expropriated by its constant circulation via images and global media channels which prompted me to keep questioning the power of images, their oppressive normativity and claims to truth. I have been pursuing this interest in image-theory; my training was focused on new media art, and I have worked largely with moving images over the course of my education and practice. I have since come to understand the digital image not solely as a visual phenomenon, but as a contested territory that extends beyond visual parameters.

I am very intrigued by the politics between what is seen and what is ‘there’, the visible and the invisible, and how language and image overlap and inform one another in our digital age. I engaged with these topics extensively in my practice using a variety of formats spanning moving image and installation, performance, lectures and writings.

At the heart of all these explorations remains my belief that the personal, the political and the poetic are inherently interwoven. My work often attempts to articulate, expose or give substance to that.

Miloš Trakilović
2019