Darije Petković, Neja Tomšič & Vladimir Živojinović: On History
The article was originally published in the publication of the exhibition of Darije Petković, Neja Tomšič & Vladimir Živojinović: On History at Artget Gallery, Kulturni centar Beograda.
History is a strange science. Today, it seems almost trivial and benign in a world of fast communication and surplus of information. For most of the people, past events are always slightly detached from reality since they do not have the same impact years, decades or centuries after they occurred. On the other hand, it is obvious that every ruling regime aims to control historical discourses because they are integral part of national and cultural identity of a certain group. Therefore, history is always supervised from above. A winner of a conflict seeks to control history in order to be remembered as a winner, and in the process manipulation of the contexts often come about. This is probably the reason that nowadays the line between history and mythology is so vague and ambivalent.
Modern national states and empires are built on historical narratives that are essential to establish a sense of patriotic belonging that are based on establishments such as schools, mass media outlets, cultural and administrative institutions. Beside the language, cultural codes and political discourses the common denominator of a certain group, or a nation, is a set of narratives from the past. History thus defines relations between individuals and groups, it gives a reference point to the people who have accepted common identity.
Therefore, history is never entirely static and cemented. On the contrary, it is rather dynamic and variable. Present-day situation can easily transform perception of the past. Historical revisionism has occurred under every single regime and zeitgeist; newly formed states aim to create their own historical narratives that are often related to conflict, struggle and sacrifice; contemporary woke movement calls for reconsideration of traditional historical cannons and advocate for revision of history based on today’s ethical perspectives; the increasingly powerful corporate sector, that now owns most of the media outlets and online communication platforms, creates its own history based on its short-term interests, concealing the role of big businesses in past turbulent events.
The need of businesses and ideologies to be embedded in the collective memory makes historiography utterly simplified and tendentious. The official history is usually written from so called bird’s perspective where an invisible eye of omniscient historian has an seemingly complete overview of the events. On the contrary, so called micro-histories that focus on obscure events are being commonly written by their protagonists. A historical event may look very different from the first hand perspective that are usually non-linear and much more complex than any of the often simplified official narratives.
Unbiased, impartial and non-linear historiography can reveal number of paradoxes which can seriously undermine negotiated heroic and idealised narratives. The three artists at the exhibition entitled On History, Darije Petković, Neja Tomšič and Vladimir Živojinović, explore historical narratives in their own distinctive ways, however, they are always outside and beyond the mainstream interpretations. They often address hidden episodes of bigger historical narratives, always viewing them from a critical distance. They reflect on various notions of history and its role in the creation of political and public discourses of the present, and address specific episodes of (inevitability related) local and global histories. They also share their doubts and disbeliefs of the simplified dominant historical narratives. By doing that they reveal their resentment towards nationalism, colonialism, and any kind of superiority complex. Even though their practices are entirely diverse, they all work in the tradition of humanistic art and photography, and furthermore, they all combine images and texts in order to further contextualise the content.
In his piece Damnatio memoriae (2017-2024) Darije Petković addresses the ways of constituting a memory by using visual means. With photographs, found objects, archive materials and texts he aims to showcase his view of selected historical events that are inscribed into the collective memory through public and media discourses. The work follows and comment upon the consequences of social, ideological and economic transition in Croatia and in the wider region. Since disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Croatia remained a transitional society that is characterised by rejection of social values of egalitarianism and by historic revisionism. Therefore, he seeks to construct a coherent narrative on the relativity of historical discourses and their dependency on the concurrent political situation, and to explore the ways people relate to the past. The central point of the series are several symbolic locations that marked the recent history in Croatia. In this exhibition, three elements of the whole series are being showcased; one of them is the work Uvala Slana (2018), that showcases the location of the first concentration camp of the NDH state (1941-1945), now being repurposed to become a popular beach. It does not bear any insignia that would remind visitors about the historical context of the place.

Neja Tomšič, Fairfield, California, Opium Clippers, 2015-2024. Photo: Coolceasar, Own Work CC BY-SA 3.0
In her interdisciplinary artistic practice Neja Tomšič often explores suppressed and overlooked episodes in history, which she aims to contextualise through a contemporary perspective. With the work Opium Clippers (2015-2024), based on multi-layered approaches, such as storytelling performance, artist book and appropriated photographs with embedded texts, she explores hidden and suppressed historic events, that to a great extent still define the social and economic models of the modern world. She collects and narrates stories that reflect upon colonial heritage, which has been obscured and ignored in official historiography, even though it offers answers to numerous complex issues related to current geopolitical relations. Opium Clippers addresses the period during which East Asian countries were forced to enter the global free market, while in turn they had to give up a substantial part of their sovereignty. The Opium Wars were triggered by Western superpowers in the middle of the 19th century, and their main goal was to force China, which was at that time an archaic empire that had not yet started the process of modernisation and industrialisation, to sell tea in exchange for opium. Through her artistic research, Tomšič exposes the legacies and traces of the Opium Wars in present times, for some of today’s largest banks, insurance companies, investment companies, transport companies, and trade conglomerates have built their power on the opium trade by the means of war, destroying public health, and spreading poverty.
In his series Danube Division (2022-2024) Vladimir Živojinović reflects on historical events through a very personal perspective. He focuses on the events surrounding the breakthrough of the Salonica front at the end of the World War One, in which his great-grandfather fought, resulting in the liberation of Serbia in 1918. The series of photographs, merged with explanatory texts, follows the footsteps of his ancestor based on the oral legacy of his family. Such micro-historical perspective showcases a different account of the events that are nowadays omnipresent in history books. Serbia was part of the victorious alliance in the great war but has, in the past fifty years, increasingly adopted a discourse of a victim. To oppose such simplified narrative Živojinović applies various approaches, such as photographs of landscapes with contexts, portraits, and family archives, in order to create a personal topography which shows the interconnectedness of official and personal histories; when the protagonists of a certain historical event pass away, the collective memory becomes the main reference point of understanding the past. Therefore, his piece showcases these grand narratives in a much less spectacular and heroic light, pointing out the hardships and traumas of that turbulent period of time in 1918. As an engaged photographer, he perceives war as an universal horror.
© Miha Colner, June 2024