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For this exhibition, Hana Miletić (b. 1982, Zagreb) has conceived an ephemeral pavilion, employing a structure originally conceived for the festival Precarious Pavilion in 2018. Designed as an intimate space, visitors may enter and attend a programme of events held within it over the course of the display. The dimensions, together with its situation in the space, were imagined as a counterpoint to the Foyer’s monumental staircase. The same intent is reflected in the facile assembly of a tubular frame covered with light fabric. The grey and white chequerboard pattern references the transparent grid used as a benchmark in the digital editing software Photoshop, and the grid used by weavers to make patterns. Miletić trained as a photographer before shifting to textile works in 2015, her work navigates a fine line between the materiality of weaving and the texture of digital images. The walls of the pavilion are thus produced using a semi-automatic Jacquard loom, a precursor of the first computer. By utilising a partlyunbound weaving mode, combined with the flexibility of the fabric sections, the artist inflects the binary and serial aesthetic of the normative grid.
This is the same method used to create Softwares (2019), one of the two works presented that have been acquired for Mudam’s collection. With each work, Miletić draws from her photographic documentation of damages and transformations in the public space. In this instance, images of a shattered car window or glass door held together with tape, from which the artist abstracts the linear form of the improvised repair. Sensitive to the socioeconomic contexts of her sources, Miletić also pays great attention to the origins of her materials and the ways in which they are transformed, favouring an ethical and ecological approach. Often fragile in appearance, the work is testament to the artist’s commitment to the ethos of care and repair.
Hana Miletić is the recipient of the 2021 Baloise Art Prize. Created in 1999, the prize is awarded every year to two artists in the Statements section of Art Basel. Hana Miletić is the sixth artist to enter the Mudam Collection with the generous support of the Baloise since the museum became a partner of the prize in 2015.
Mudam Summer Project 2022
An ephemeral pavilion created by artist Hana Miletić (1982, Zagreb) for the museum’s Foyer will be the site of this year’s Summer Project.
The piece, whose first iteration was installed in a public space in Brussels as part of the Precarious Pavilion festival (2018), will serve as a meeting place during a summer-long series of events at Mudam. Trained as a photographer, Miletić has been making textile work since 2015. The walls of this simply-designed pavilion, which feature a grid pattern used in digital image-making and weaving, were made using a semi-automatic Jacquard loom, one of the precursors of modern computers. With its cherckerboard shape it recalls both the grids on which weaving patterns are drawn and the othonormal coordinate system used in Photoshop.
Miletić’s other textile works, two of which are featured in the current exhibition 25 years of the Mudam Collection, are just as complex. To the artist, her textile work is always thematically layered. She recognises the medium’s connotations as a female-specific craft and uses this to put issues of community, gender and tradition into perspective. Miletić also invests it with metaphorical meaning centred around the notion of ‘care and repair’. She sees in this a sort of ‘soft activism’ through which she can help establish new relationships between people.
Softwares (Precarious Pavilion) (2022), a space within a space, will welcome the Luxembourgish organisation Mamie et Moi, which will host intergenerational knitting circles and provide a place where people of all ages will have the opportunity to share their knowledge and knowhow in a relaxed atmosphere. Parallel to this, discussions will be held as part of the Café des Langues, in collaboration with RYSE (Refugee Youth Support & Empowerment), an initiative that supports immigrants. It is an open invitation to practice foreign languages and gain some mutual understanding. Finally, the pavilion will be a site for small group conferences where museum collections will be discussed in the context of the exhibition 25 Years of the Mudam Collection. These gatherings and dialogues will help develop the social fabric within the museum and beyond.