FRENCH KISS - FILMSKI POLJUBAC
Damir Niksic

Installation vidéo 12 min. 100x75 cm

My artwork is about identity: individual identity as well as the identity of the group I belong to, or am associated with by others. I try to deal with the discrimination and stereotypes related to my cultural tradition.

Because I share same fate as most of my compatriots, expressing my thoughts and feelings is at the same time speaking for many others, making my art both didactic and autobiographical. I am keenly aware of the relation between being specific, sending universal messages, and tendencies toward generalizing and simplification in order to make my art more accessible.

From my work as an art historian, I refer to history, mostly the nineteenth-century art which played an important role in the Western political, cultural and military campaign against the Ottoman Empire - Christendom against Islam. Through visuals, executed in the style of academic realism, Western and Balkan Christian Nations constructed their identities, redefining their histories and institutionalizing their image of the past. They also created a negative image of the Turks and the Balkan Muslims. These constructions were established as part of the National State identities and have been cultivated until the present days, in the form of movie and television series, effectively used for mobilizing the masses into a frenzy of exclusive nationalism and the fascist fanaticism of the Crusader mentality. Many of these images were used as justifications for the ethnic cleansing and genocide in 1990's in Bosnia.

In my work, I am revisiting the past, the images of my people as portrayed by others, comparing history with the current situation. In technical terms, I also want my art to achieve the same publicness as history painting, whether displayed in the gallery, show rooms, shop windows, or reproduced on everyday objects to become part of every home. Site-specific or non-site-specific public screenings in galleries, adapted spaces, building facades, playing my videos on local TV stations, home DVDs - these are the mediums I use to carry my messages.

As a video artist, I refer to cinema as a present-day monumental art form which continues the tradition of history painting. I use a minimum of basic movie-making elements, scenes from actual movies combined with my acting, in order to create short sketches, impressions of cinema, manipulated to fit my intent. These low or no-budget works have a rough and raw quality, an unfinished and primitive look, structured to preserve the language and format of cinema, its atmosphere and dynamics. Audiences all around the world are trained to read the visual language of the cinema. I am trying to send my message using the shortest possible sentences of that language.