FREEDOM, EMANCIPATION, EDUCATION, LABOUR!, 2024, site-specific mural, 14.3m x 3.5m. Collaborators: Iliana Petrushevska (technical layout), Paint Kartel (execution).
Kun: Freedom, Emancipation, Education, Labour, Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, organised on the 120th anniversary of the birth of Đorđe Andrejević Kun an important artist and revolutionary, a professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and an academician, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Gallery, Belgrade. Curated by Simona Ognjanović and Ana Panić; organisers: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, and the Museum of Yugoslavia.
The mural is inspired by Djordje Andrejevic-Kun’s monumental memorial mosaic in Ivanjica dedicated to fallen fighters in the National Liberation Struggle "Uprising" unveiled on the Uprising Day on July 7, 1957. The ten colours on the mural are extracted from the large sketch made by the artist in his studio in 1952.
The abstract shapes on the mural are letters written with my Cyrillic typography “Archetype Open Form” stating: “Freedom, Emancipation, Education, Labour!” Those were the revolutionaries' primary aims they were fighting for in the past, achievements that have been questioned and challenged in the present, and purposes that need to be broadened and considered outside of the anthropocentric behaviour for the (still) possible future.
The typography “Archetype Open Form” resulted from my continual interest in working with letters and text. My research into typography was inspired by Josef Albers’s typeface “Archetype Albers”, developed in 1926–1931 based on the basic geometric shapes (square, triangle, and circle) as a response to the rapid transformation of the public space and its commercialized, and from Oskar and Zofia Hanse’s theory of Open Form (1959) which withdraws hierarchies to free space for other voices in the urban development. During my development process that started in 2016, I erased the vertical and horizontal lines, the hierarchies of the letters, to create a nonbinary typeface consisting only of longer and shorter diagonal lines, circles, and semicircles. This allows me to play with the legibility and illegibility of a text, and it forces reading to become an active performative process by the viewer, to decode what was written and what was hidden.