OVERVIEW

Saša Tkačenko

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2021

1979

Serbia

Eugster || Belgrade

I am a Berliner, he told me in Russian. I feel good here. But now I go back to Mongolia every summer. I am like you. If I go there I feel like a tourist and if I stay here I feel like a tourist. You know how I get out of this? I fly Berlin-Ulan Bator on Air France. They have the best Champagne.

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Both in the case of Sunset and I’m like you, landscape served as a basis around which the textual narrative was built. Both works come to life as an error by manual repetition and aim to increase the artificiality in creating an image out of a motive originating in nature. An aluminium panel treated with colours normally used on cars, polished to a high gloss, is transformed into a blue sky horizon. The horizon conceals a quotation from Future of Nostalgia (2005), a book by Svetlana Bojm. Champagne bottles p ...

About

Saša Tkačenko currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. His artistic practice engages spaces and their transformation when exposed to other media, as their architectural features interact with sculpture, video and installation. Tkačenko’s works thus create dynamic situations in which the audience plays a constituent part, often reflecting on motives and stories from popular culture and contemporary human life. He has been exhibiting since 2008, including shows at institutions such as Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna, Museum of Contem ...

Two minutes before the crime, one minute before ...
2021
Video 12’ 02”, colour, sound, wallpaper
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Trust but verify, 2020
Framed digital print, hand engraved text on the glass
and hand engraved vase

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In conversation

Saša Tkačenko and Teodora Nikčević

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Your work clearly shows the intention to re-examine all contemporary forms of human communication and directly illuminate all its dysfunctional areas. In fact, by using the communication apparatus itself, you point out the paradoxes that arise within that system. Does contemporary communication help us form functional communities and escape our own loneliness? What social and personal feeling emerges as a result of this metamorphosis?


I have always been fascinated by the bipolarity of the human race, if I may put it that way :). The thought that everything on the outside ...

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Hybrid Song, 2019

Delegated performance, performed by Andrea Tešanović
Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbia

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Ruins of Future Utopia
by Natalija Paunić, published in: moussemagazine.it, 2018

Nostalgia certainly frames Saša Tkačenko’s art, coming out both as a theme and a method of creation. Having belonged to a dead nation with a particular sense for utopia, the artist, like many of Yugoslavia-born from his generation, lives with phantom experiences that accompany real-time events. The word nostalgia contains the word pain in its Greek origin, therefore it is bound to have a direct connotation. Its hidden power, however, operates behind this supposition, which is why Tkačenko’s work takes us by surprise as it renders nostalgic feelings as strangely inviting and affirmative.

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Saša Tkačenko Ruins of Future Utopia Courtesy of the artist and Eugster Belgrade Photo by Ivan Zupanc 14

Teen spirit, 2017
video, color, no sound, 11’ 59” loop

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The video installation Teen spirit uses a scene from a concert by the band Nirvana as its starting point. The guitarist Kurt Cobain is placed on the shoulders of the bass player Krist Novoselich and the two keep spinning in circles, creating one of the iconic shows which would later became characteristic for the performances of the band, abounding with destruction of the objects on the stage. In the video, two teenagers are trying to reconstruct this movement. The camera circles around them, and using slow-motion, the video analyses their bodies “frozen” in movement. Unlike the original scene ...

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Fear, 2018

Patch on shirt
digital print on fabric, 30 x 40 cm (120 x 80 cm shirt)

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To speak of a dead nation in the language of lust
by Natalija Paunić, published in: Ruines of Future Utopia book/vinyl, 2018

There are two instincts in life: one that promotes pleasure and harmony through libido, the other based on self-destruction and destruction in general. Freud aptly named them Eros and Thanatos, instincts of life and death (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920). To explain Thanatos, Freud often used the example of war veterans who tended to relive their traumatic experiences in dreams or even consciously, concluding that living beings, in fact, have an urge to die. This desire gets perpetually contested by the will to live, but experience tells us that, as far as individual human life is concerned, Tha ...

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Editions

Vinyl

Ruines Of Future Utopia, 2018

Vinyl and publication in print (40 pages)
Dimension: 31 x 31 cm
Edition: 200

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Vanity (scarf), 2019

Dimensions: 20 x 200 cm
Materials: Cotton-wool
Edition: 30

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