The Visitor, 2002-2003
Projection of 160 slides
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2010
In 2002, Serbian artist Ivan Grubanov moved to Amsterdam to begin an artist residency programme at the Rijksakademie, the city’s State Academy of Arts. His move coincided with the start of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević’s trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. For two years, Grubanov attended the trial of a man against whom he had mobilised as a young activist, eventually settling into the role of courtroom sketch artist as he tried to process the intense and often conflicting emotions that this confrontation with his country’s recent traumatic past had evoked. The Visitor is the outcome of this process. It is an installation comprising 160 slides of pen-and-ink drawings created by the artist while attending the trial. Thematically, it functions as an experiential, visual shorthand that documents the relationship between personal memory and official historiography.
Ivan Grubanov creates works that expand the medium of painting into other artistic fields, such as photography, as exemplified by The Visitor. At the same time, his works explore the possibilities and limits of art as a medium for recording and interpreting history. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Grubanov introduces a different, non-dominant perspective into the interpretation of current social and political affairs, in which values from the past survive and continue to shape the present. At the core of his investigative practice lies the creative process itself, as well as the role of the artist as both the subject and writer of history.
Ivan Grubanov was born in 1976 in Belgrade, where he lives and works.
