Built-up Area, 2020
metal, 500 x 250 x 35 cm (city of Užice, Serbia, public sculpture)
production: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia
curators: Blanka de la Torre and Zoran Erić
photos: artist, Bojana Janjić
A traffic sign for built-up area can be found at the entrance of every settlement everywhere in the world. The sign usually has black silhouette representing an amalgam of urban and village landscape on the white background. It is an abstracted version of the settlement. The general characteristics of the settlement and building tradition are sublimated in this silhouette. It represents the way in which the bodies adopting laws see the settlements in a particular country.
The signs are generally standardized and represent a combination of low and high rise characteristic for particular territory and often with foregrounded religious object, so they vary slightly from country to country. In some places, the signs represent only low houses, in other, there are also churches and high rise. In countries where gothic architecture used to dominate the landscape, we can see the silhouette of such buildings, in Iran we can see mosques, in the Netherlands, windmill etc. The sign for built-up area in Serbia is a modified sign that was used earlier in Germany. Spiked top of the church is simply flattened and the building object is thus transformed into high rise.
The sculpture/installation BUILT-UP AREA is a tridimensional version of one such sign. It is a translation of the reality. It is a tridimensional interpretation of two-dimensional image that is a sublimation itself of the overall architecture of a particular country.
The piece is made in two versions of the same format, 500 x 250 x 35 cm. Monochromatic, sculptural version created in steel sheets 3 mm thick, is placed in front of the Contemporary Arts Museum, and the installation constructed from found material, which follows the same silhouette, is in the Museum itself as a part of the exhibition Overview Effect.