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"My name is Milica and I got it in 1960. I was born in Belgrade,
in Yugoslavia, a country which in those years entered the phase
of sudden modernization.
However, in the early 1980s, I began to meet people who pronounced
my name with awe. In the few years of socializing with people
who pronounced my name with awe, I suddenly felt pierced by the
arrow of necessity to equate the following elements:
I=MILICA=SERBIAN=ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN
That which I considered to be my most intimate identity, the fact
that I am an Orthodox Christian Serbian, in the late 1980s set
in motion a hypnotic pendulum of state politics that produced
the mass hallucinatory effect of a collective identity, in which
there was no place for those who did not feel like Serbs or Orthodox
Christians. Moreover, ideologists of this policy claimed that
the intimacy of the personal identity was biologically determined,
written into the genes, and that the Serbs who do not feel like
that were bastards with a genetic defect, and that they should
be destroyed since they were a wound on the healthy body of the
Serb community. Then I discovered that my own, intimate identity
is actually a carefully devised trap that flawlessly traps the
prey of identity, regardless of whether I, Milica, Serbian and
Orthodox Christian, am ready to denounce or at least relativize
it. Put before the impossible choice: the wound or the healthy
body of the nation, I have decided to privately keep the identity
of an Orthodox Serbian, while publicly speaking from the position
of a wound" (Milica Tomiç).
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Milica Tomiç
ives and works in Belgrade; exhibitions a.o. 2001 Charim Gallery,
Vienna; 2000 Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem; Gallery CAMERA
AUSTRIA, Graz; Gallery Charim Klocker, Vienna; Kunsthalle Vienna;
1999 Gallery Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Gallery Kulturni Centar,
Belgrade; Group exhibitions a.o. 2001 Konverzacija, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Belgrade; ARS 01, Museum of Contemporary Art
KIASMA, Helsinki; double life, Generali Foundation, Wien; 2000
cooperativ – Kunstdialoge Ost – West, Kunstverein Ulm;
2000+ Arteast collection, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana; SHOO, Malmö
Konsthall; 1999 After the Wall, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; 1998
Focus Belgrad, IFA Gallery Berlin; 1997 Zonen der Ver_Störung,
Steirischer Herbst Graz
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