Ana Bilankov

Man, Ship and a Landscape

3 Photographic Series
Man, Ship and a Landscape consists of three different series that I started at the very beginning of my experimental photography in 1997 with Landscape with Human...

3 Photographic Series

Man, Ship and a Landscape consists of three different series that I started at the very beginning of my experimental photography in 1997 with Landscape with Human Figure 1-4. This was followed by White 1-2 (1998/2012) as well as photographs generated from the video Man, Ship and a Landscape from 2013. The works are part of my visual research into the monochrome picture, some kind of Suprematist approach within still and moving image.

Untitled (Apollo Moonlanding & Hall of Presidents)

Photographic Series, 2015

These monochromatic photographs I made from old found slides with the help of a nanotronic-microscope in the science laboratory of Pioneer Works in New York, where...

Photographic Series, 2015

These monochromatic photographs I made from old found slides with the help of a nanotronic-microscope in the science laboratory of Pioneer Works in New York, where I was artist in residence. The enlargements show some details of common places of American cultural history such as landing on the moon or showing wax figures of all American presidents as a historical spectacle within Disney Theme Park in Florida. I was interested in the materiality and the multilayered visual structure of the image itself with and beyond the graphic scratches and damages of the slide surface. Like photographic palimpsests of some rewritten fragmented history.

Night Cities Series

Photographic Series, 2012-2015

The series of photographs I made in several cities at night, most of them in Berlin and New York. I tried to ketch up the moment...

Photographic Series, 2012-2015

The series of photographs I made in several cities at night, most of them in Berlin and New York. I tried to ketch up the moment when the banality of everyday life turns into reduced abstraction and beauty. It is some kind of "inner photography" reflecting my interest in urban psychograms, heterotopias and no-places. It reflects also my interest in the themes of dislocation, migration, nomadism and the construction of identity within a state of “in-betweeness”.

The last four photographs are from the series “Without Title (Berlin Teufelsberg)” I made on location of the former US (NSA) listening station on the top of the artificial hill, heaped up from parts of the rubble of Berlin from WWII. It is a part of my ongoing visual research project “Geography of Memory”.

Shadowing the Black Square: Moscow Fragments

Photographic Series, 2004

This photographic series was inspired by Malevich’s “Black Square” which I saw in Tretyakov Gallery during my residency at Moscow House of Photography. Here and in...

Photographic Series, 2004

This photographic series was inspired by Malevich’s “Black Square” which I saw in Tretyakov Gallery during my residency at Moscow House of Photography. Here and in related video works my gaze focuses on the psyche of the post-communist society following its experience of the failure of a utopia. The state of personal and political “in-betweeness” relates with the phenomena of collective memory but also omnipresent surveillance.

ARTIST`S STATEMENT

Between Malevich and the Revolution _ displaced reality _ searching for the black square _ irony of history _ finding a nostalgically utopian picture of a protest _ fluid interspaces _ seizing counterpoints with camera _ beautiful/spiritual _ absurd/ bizarre _ looking for an inside perspective _ postcommunist subjects walking around _ acceleration _ claustrophobia _ Lenin is hugging me _ experience means art _ an archetypal amalgam of the familiar and the unlived _ conquering space _ happiness _ amazement as a permanent state _ reality is staged.

About author

Visual artist, born in Zagreb, Croatia, lives and works in Berlin. Her conceptual and contextual practice in the media photography, video/experimental film, installation and text examines themes of poetics / politics of dislocation, migration, nomadism, individual and collective memory and construction of identity within „in-between-ness“. She studied Art History and German Language and Literature at the Universities of Zagreb and Mainz; Art Photography at Wiesbaden School of Fine Arts and postgraduate studies program “Fine Art in Context “at the University of the Arts Berlin (M.A.) and the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

She won several grants from Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe and was many times an artist in residence in different European cities and in the USA, e.g. Residency Unlimited and Pioneer Works, New York, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, USA; Moscow House of Photography; Q21_MuseumsQuartier, Vienna.

Bilankov’s works have been shown internationally in art venues like Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb / Institut for Contemporary Art, Zagreb / National Museum Gdansk, Poland / Photon Gallery, Ljubljana / Dazibao Centre de Photographies Actuelles, Montreal / Kino Arsenal, Berlin / School of Visual Arts, New York / Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin / Collegio Armeno, Venice / Galerie Weisser Elefant, Berlin / Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka / 1st Moscow Biennale, Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Gallery Nova_WHW, Zagreb, as well as at film & video festivals like 29. Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival / South East European Film Festival #2, Berlin / 25. Days of Croatian Film, Zagreb / Video in Progress 5, Ljubljana / 25 FPS – International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zagreb.

She has been guest lecturer and artistic director of numerous educational workshops and participatory art projects in collaboration with international universities, galleries and museums, as well as art mediator at Documenta 11, Kassel, 4th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, at Martin-Gropius-Bau and at Neue Gesellschaft fuer Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin.