Access

“access”, Miladinović’s new video work, features a nondescript, grey, dry business environment in which anonymous, slightly ridiculous businessmen with drab suits and briefcases, a cleaning woman quietly going about her cleaning, a metro station and a peculiar lift take centre stage. The film is a kind of confusing non-event which intrigues precisely because it is a non-event: an illogical succession of minor, banal actions by anonymous, silent, mostly waiting figures in carefully staged settings, in which the absurd, repetition and – to a lesser degree – the surreal are recurrent themes. Although the film, and to a certain extent all of Miladinović’s work, is exceedingly illogical and alienating, it offers an instant familiarity, enabling the viewer to easily identify with what can be seen and heard. That’s why I would describe the piece as a visual fiction, and certainly not as a fantasy. Fiction offers the possibility of an immediate acceptance or credibility, like a seemingly realistic novel with convincing characters and a plausible plot. Fantasy is more like a world with its own laws, peopled by fantasy creatures that are far from our everyday lives. The artist does not go down that route. Her alienating fiction serves her well.
The observational character, the through-composed images, the attention to colour, detail, silence and rhythm and the sometimes slightly menacing undercurrent of Miladinović’s fiction evoke cinematic stylists such as Roy Andersson, Jacques Tati and David Lynch. The non-event dimension and the manipulation of banalities and messages between the lines in turn conjure up the bleak but compelling short stories of Raymond Carver. The ironic interaction with a given setting in a public space suggests to me similarities with installation artists such as the Belgian Guillaume Bijl, while I associate the pervasive absurdity and the unmistakable mise en scène in her work with the world of Samuel Beckett.

From "Out of the Ordinanry", Hans Op de Beeck, 2012