The audio-visual installation EXIT refers to segments of personal experience of Hasena Sulojdžić-Terzić from Pljevlja, Montenegro, who, during her seven-month captivity in the German concentration camp Ludwigsfelde, worked underground for an aircraft factory the facilities of which were owned by Daimler-Benz, today’s Mercedes-Benz corporation.

The work deals with the phenomenon of phantasm and the recalcitrance of the imaginary structure and the world of symbols, which eludes the violence in the camps, conducted on a symbolic, mental and instrumental plane, the final and the concrete, thus allowing for the possibility of subversion, interruption, and exit.[1] The forensic objects in the installation speculatively treat the phenomena of memory, personal memory, phantasm and time. The phantasm is connected with the basic processes of the unconscious – desires, affections, passions, fears; it is a vital force of radical uncertainty, through which a biopolitical breakthrough and an exit, represented through the sound part of the installation – the narration of the story The Alsatian[2], were made possible.

EXIT testifies to the existence of something unbreakable and untameable in every human being – the vitality of a life which can never be entirely suppressed and over which no system can have complete control. Indeed, it is a space of struggle in which the practices of freedom can also disarm the contemporary psychopolitics of neoliberal capitalism, dependent labour, continuous re-colonization and fascization, and open up to a mode of existence which still does not have a name, which is a future yet to be written![3]

[1] See Mbembe Achille, Kritika črnskega uma, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2019, 161.

[2] The short story The Alsatian was written by Radovan Vujadinović, based on the testimony of Hasena Sulojdžić-Terzić about an event which had happened in the German concentration camp Ludwigsfelde. The story was taken from the collection of short stories titled The Trail, published by “ČETVRTI JUL”, Belgrade, in 1984.

[3] See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, (London:  Verso, 2017), 78-79.

EXIT
audio-visual installation
ca. 460 cm x 120 cm

Lenka Đorojević (born in Nikšić, Montenegro) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. Through solo and collaborative art projects, she explores and critically interprets the ambivalence of the position of the (artistic) subject in the context of mass media, digitally constructed realities and late capitalist productional, representational, ideological and symbolic narratives and strategies. She graduated at the Graphics Department of the Fine Arts Academy in Trebinje (BIH) in 2008 and holds a Master of Arts in Graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in collaboration with the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television Ljubljana, (SI), obtained in 2013. She completed the World of Art, School for Curatorial Practices and Critical Writing, Ljubljana in 2013. She has been a member of the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art Montenegro from 2014. She is a PhD student at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana as of 2018. In tandem with Matej Stupica she received the OHO award in 2015. She lives and works in Ljubljana (Slovenia).

Her work was exhibited at venues and festivals such as the MuseumsQuartier Wien (AT),  Photon Gallery (AT), Mondial de l’Estampe et de la Gravure Originale Chamalières (FR), Venice International Performance Art Week (IT), A plus A Gallery Venice (IT), Residency Unlimited New York (USA), Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (SI), 7^th, 8^th and 9^th Triennial of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova and Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana (SI), International Centre of Graphic Arts (SI), Škuc Gallery (SI), KiBela/Kibla Gallery (SI), Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH), U10 Art Space (SRB), Miodrag Dado Đurić Gallery (MNE), “Art” Gallery (MNE).