Nemanja Nikolic

The Plot
text by Sima Kokotovic and Milos Zec
Continuing with a research in the medium of animation, initiated with the works Panic book (2012-2016), Double noir (2015) and Uncontained images (2017), with his latest one, The Plot, Nemanja Nikolić, offers, what seems to be, a final stage of the journey.
The Plot is the collection of works on paper and black board, done in the pen and ink technique, with the occasional use of carbon and white chalk. All are drawings of the scenes, small pictures (frames), and sequences taken from the films originated during the Cold war period (1947-1989/91). Though employing, for the most part, similar materials and a method of drawing that he relied on in the previously completed series, the artist now introduces several differences. While in the work Panic book the images were drawn on the pages of books and magazines from the areas of social and political theory, or biographies of significant persons from the socialist self-management period, in The Plot, for the drawing base, he introduces, as well, maps from the same period representing the expansion of the railroad, the progress of the electrification of the country, military maps, and similar. As in the previous instances, he found this material, which dynamically varies in its format and shape, searching around Belgrade flea markets, dusty archives and besaments of the former social companies.
In the Jean-Luc Godard film Pierrot le Fou, American director Samuel Fuller explicitly pontificates the following: Film is like a battlefield. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word... emotion. The fragmented nature of the citation suggests mutual collision of these heterogeneous elements, with the film itself operating as the connecting combustible explosion. If we take this to be true, then The Plot - final moving pictures of Nemanja Nikolic, offers an insight about the specific zero position of the cine-world[1]of the artist himself, that is, his fragmented universe of cine-effects, signs, images and comments drawn from the specific tradition of the Hollywood cinema. Employing his means of expression in the loosest manner till now, Nemanja intertwines the dramatic film scenes of escapes and chases with the melodramatic escapades, roaring cinetic pictures of the locomotives and airplanes with the close-ups of the Hollywood stars awaken from the nightmarish dreams, threading a kaleidoscopic interpretation of practice which film theorist Pavle Levi names - cinema by other means.[2]
Central narrative thread, provisionally speaking, is being woven throughout several montage units (motives) - nightmarish dreams, panic, escape, airplanes, trains, chase, fall, explosion. Stylistically, these new images remain within the formerly constituted framework of the artist's drawing expression, characterized by the high level of expressivity and effectiveness imbued with emphasized contrast. In more detail, the montage of these individual units is again based on the visual analogies, external similarity of bodies, objects, movements, and narratives. Through the animation of the individual frames, Nemanja creates a specific cine-effect by the juxtaposition of the heterogeneous film images which operate in contrast, literally as well, to their original purpose. In other words, these are the pictures that don't necessarily belong together, even though, offered to us in such manner, create shared visual contexts.
Using famous visual references,[3] the artist helps us to recognize them, while the simultaneous lack of the original context disables an easy interpretation, thus keeping the work in the slippery interpretative zone. The easily acknowledged references are annulled, while the visual codes which previously signified one thing, now, decontextualized, distort and blur former meanings. Thus, the asymmetrical connections between the references and the newly created images are being established. These micro aberrations only highlight the endeavor's fictionality, and point to the artist's own cinematic space without actually existing within it.
In respect to the contemporary artistic research procedures which rely on uncovering the visual repository of the historical project of the Yugoslav state socialism, Nemanja's work operates as an elaborate model for setting up a dialogue between the content of different media formats. The  dialogue juxtaposes two different media registers; on the one hand, film stands as a constant within the  cycles Panic book, Uncontained images, The Plot, while on the other, the backgrounds take turns in the shape of socialist textbooks, the political theory books of self-management, and, in the most recent work, maps of the state infrastructural achievements. In this manner Nemanja delineates the network of relationships between different models of cultural content, uncovering, from a temporal distance, unexpected affective, as well as, symbolic repositories of the Yugoslavia's socialist cultural sphere and its heritage.
The material testimonies of the nation state's political project are offered as a backdrop for the experiments in the field of animation, which are propelled by Nemanja's cinephile relationship toward, above all, Hollywood cinema. This cinephilic impulse stands in a direct relation with the cultural imaginaries generated in the period of Yugoslav socialism. If the status of the American cinema in the local cultural climate doesn't come as a surprise, as an imperial tool of the Euro-American liberalism is certainly a century phenomenon which doesn't need an additional explication[4], its significance, which shows itself  throughout The Plot as well as the former series, reminds us of the limitations of the geopolitical horizon projected on the period marked by the anti-imperialistic tendencies. In an attempt to avoid the limitations of the Cold war dynamics, Yugoslavia emphatically joined and significantly contributed to the project of the third world internationalism. Although the contributions of the Yugoslav film workers to the cultural infrastructure, which was being built at the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s, through the organizations such as The Third World Cinema Committee[5] have become the focus propel and mold the creative process of this tradition, Nemanja's work enables us to discern and contemplate the cultural and geopolitical horizon of the Yugoslav socialism, as well as the artistic imaginaries of the ex-Yugoslav/Serbian postsocialism.

Drawings and Animation by Nemanja Nikolic,
text by Miroslav Karic (catalog "Instead of Ending", Belgrade 2015)

The current series of works by Nemanja Nikolic, presented at the exhibition at the Cultural Centre of Belgrade Art Gallery, is based on the cross-section of the author's previous interests in the media of drawing, animation and film. His fascination with the seventh art has turned Nemanja's initial studies of form and expressive potentials of drawing in more complex visual thinking and linking the language of visual art and film. Film is also the author's starting point in defining the motif space in his works and artistic approaches that are still focused on classical drawing, but conceptually expanded and rounded through the moving image properties. In animation, soon adopted as his new visual expression, Nemanja most often refers to Alfred Hitchcock's film work, finding in the poetics of the said director some conceptual preferences and directions for further development in themes, form and style in his art practice. The author retains the method of gradual (frame by frame) deconstruction and translation of the chosen scenes from Hitchcock's works into the medium of drawing as the initial process for what will be the essential outcome of restarting those scenes in animation: creating of completely new visual entities. Psychological tension and uncertainty, as the only narrative structure of the newly created scenes, are strongly accented by Nemanja's characteristic drawing expression which, in now exhibited work Panic Book and in the synthesis with the textual record, further strengthens their visual effect and dramaturgical framework. Namely, this time the artist makes a series of several hundred drawings on the pages of books and magazines in the field of social and political thought in socialist Yugoslavia, which become a kind of mise-en-scène of playing Hitchcock's cult scenes of escape, mass panic and fear. Connecting written materials on theoretical considerations, analyses of the political system of self-management, mechanisms of the organization and development of Yugoslav society with film classics  masters of suspense, Nemanja, in fact, makes deconstruction, parallel flow and confrontation of pictures of different social contexts of a time period the key events in his drawing works. Placed in series or animated, these sequences introduce the observer to discovering the many levels of meaning of their contents and to understanding, through the prism of ideology, the nature and dynamics of social relationships, mass psychology, individual-collective relations, dialectic tension between order and chaos. In further interpretations, the author's dealing with the heritage of Yugoslav socialism is a topical and thematic initiation of his latest art production in reviewing the not so distant dramatic developments and recent social and political circumstances in the territory of the former state. In this regard, the exhibition touches and raises many questions about post-conflict and transitional reality, from the tendencies of historical revisionism, to the position of an ordinary man and his everyday existence in the aggravating economic and other crises which we, as societies and communities, face.