Mirza Dedac, a Serbian artist, guides his own poetics by scanning in the recesses of the image, which is today inextricably linked to new technologies. He analyzes the consequent change in the concept of memory in relation to the most ancient of the arts: painting. The artist challenges current social problems by extinguishing the border between life and art, and dissolves the existential problems of individuals in the latter.

Death Case presents a collection of film obituaries aimed at commemorating the death of all the characters who died in films produced by socialist Yugoslavia since the 1960s.

The artist frames each obituary with a handmade wooden box through an archiving process that creates a memory for characters that never existed, celebrating them as real.

Mirza Deda’s poetic link to the concept of memory is properly manifested here, where the death of cinematographic characters interacts with the death of the nation that created them. The relationship between the two deaths is framed by the ritual of archiving that the artist performs in order to save the memories of a now-defunct nation and the fictitious characters of which it is the mother.

Luana De Franco