Hana Miletić

For this exhibition, Hana Miletić (b. 1982, Zagreb) has conceived an ephemeral pavilion, employing a structure originally conceived for the festival Precarious Pavilion in 2018. Designed as an intimate space, visitors may enter and attend a programme of events held within it over the course of the display. The dimensions, together with its situation in the space, were imagined as a counterpoint to the Foyer’s monumental staircase. The same intent is reflected in the facile assembly of a tubular frame covered with light fabric. The grey and white chequerboard pattern references the transparent grid used as a benchmark in the digital editing software Photoshop, and the grid used by weavers to make patterns. Miletić trained as a photographer before shifting to textile works in 2015, her work navigates a fine line between the materiality of weaving and the texture of digital images. The walls of the pavilion are thus produced using a semi-automatic Jacquard loom, a precursor of the first computer. By utilising a partlyunbound weaving mode, combined with the flexibility of the fabric sections, the artist inflects the binary and serial aesthetic of the normative grid.

This is the same method used to create Softwares (2019), one of the two works presented that have been acquired for Mudam’s collection. With each work, Miletić draws from her photographic documentation of damages and transformations in the public space. In this instance, images of a shattered car window or glass door held together with tape, from which the artist abstracts the linear form of the improvised repair. Sensitive to the socioeconomic contexts of her sources, Miletić also pays great attention to the origins of her materials and the ways in which they are transformed, favouring an ethical and ecological approach. Often fragile in appearance, the work is testament to the artist’s commitment to the ethos of care and repair.