The Joshua tree and its ability to grow amongst harsh and unforgiving terrain have long been a symbol of faith for thriving amidst adversity. It is seen as a symbol of love, hope, and faith, that beauty and life can still flourish in the most challenging of times and environments.
***
“Delusions” are directed moving images which refer to the past, present and uncertain future. They reveal raw feelings and question stories that we tell ourselves, our obsessions, desires, which are on the border between reality and fantasy. This is perhaps the most intimate work of Branko Milisković so far and a depiction of his inner mental habitat that becomes a projection of the hidden desires, fantasies and delusions rooted deep in our subconscious.
“Delusions” have a dark tone at the beginning, creating tension in anticipation of the action, which becomes a living image, almost tangible in space and ready to interact with the observer. By building characters, the artist actually creates a “body”, which he then occupies and inhabits. In this case, the body is a construct that is obsessed with the idea of another, who is not present, and whose presence is sensed precisely in the space between the observer and the representation of the body.
Branko Milisković’s art is theatrical, conceived through carefully constructed stage personas that are created by combining text, playing with words and images. His performances are highly aestheticized and often on the border between theater, opera and performance. By comparing the setting made up of moving images with the theater, we see ourselves on the stage, wandering, facing a bodily experience and an “imagined” world of memory and longing. The conceptual “world” of the exhibition is manifested through images in physical relation and mutual connection, and the presented images are not mimesis, but simulation. “Delusions” are an installation that is performative and declarative, it calls for interaction, for creating your own story and for confession. “Delusions” seem like a lucid projection of illusions, fantasized realities, obsessions, everything that is formed as daydreaming, reverie or radiant, sincere meditation when it comes to the short-term pleasures and permanent pains of existence. The exhibition is reminiscent of a performative dream, or a psychotic state characterized by excessive craving, passionate psychosis or erotomania.
Jealousy, sadness, longing for another, someone who is absent, play an important role in the projection of worry and obsession. The other, the “stranger”, is designed as a mechanism to cover up depression, lucidity and loneliness. Milisković gives the observer a dual role – that of a voyeur and the other who is the object of obsession. The temporary unfolding occurs at the moment of the repeating cycles that allow us to surrender to that role or simply get out of it. This is not an exhibition about experience, it is an experience. A certain narrative can be roughly sketched while the dreamy rest remains there and shapes the different feelings we are about to experience. Images are pure in their sensuality, and the sounds and words we hear are more often introspection than narration, poetry trapped in the boundless space between reality and fantasy.
Longing is one of the central motives of the exhibition, and remembering past events or constructing fantasies about those that could have happened are related to the absence of the “other”… Milisković likes to feed on the belief that everything that happened had some meaning, that the meaning of the past is now clear, that the past and/or fantasy are safer than reality because they are certain. “Delusions” show a fascination with the multiplication, reflection and complexity of the human psyche, they are the result of the tension between the conflicting private and public personalities of the individual, the true and false “fictional” self.
Text. Katarina Kostandinović
brankomiliskovic.wordpress.com 
