CURA.

I have a book of short stories of Catalan writer Pere Calders at the side of my bed. His short stories constitute the most amazing collection of small individual gestures capable of repairing the whole universe. In one of his stories, a man cares so much about the state of the things and people around him that he barely manages to get a little food into his stomach. The very moment he steps out of his house, a person, an animal, a wall, a bench needs a little bit of fixing and the day ends only few meters away from where he started it. Having lived almost all his life in the same building, every time he bumps into an older neighbor who complains about a little problem, he concentrates all his efforts in trying to assist: holding shopping bags, belittling the fact that grandchildren do not visit too often anymore, making sure there is enough food for the few street cats still in the neighborhood… A life dedicated to care implies a predisposition to think about one’s time as the time for others.

I always loved how Calders’ short stories describe the universe of acute observers of the real. Almost always men like himself, who seem to be unable to move on with their lives since the lives of others are always in front of them. These characters force us to see every detail, from the peeling of a wall in a building that needs a good coat of paint to the complaints that we constantly express in our everyday lives.

Her works activate several methods of seeing—the photographic image, the haptic, the hand weaving, the object standing, the work presenting itself, the wall activating a background. But also the colors she uses are very particular, creating some sort of illusion of conceptual centers that resonate with certain histories of art and materials that are linked with a memory of politics. Her works intentionally erase any literal reference to the public space that constitutes their origin. And yet they arrange themselves as a sort of main square with the ambition of touching us and make us create an assembly. Her works intend to create sculptural environments where the perpetual self-critique of past systems gets replaced by the possibility of a self-renewal force emerging from immediate touch and care. Have we really outgrown the dilemmas that arise with the dream of a life in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all? I do not think so. And therefore it is so important to invent through juxtaposing and capturing the material realities of the world with the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression, social conflict, and cultural upheaval that define the current urban and non-urban existence. With its focus on materials, Hana Miletić’s work also manages to produce strangely physical dream images and ghostly appearances. Memory politics and the mental environments they create are the focus of her work, motivated by the transformations that originated after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but not only. The contemporary transformation of metropolitan and rural areas worldwide under neoliberal siege and digital triumphalism raises questions about the earlier development of metropolitan experience in its relationship to certain media, industrial production and, today, digital dissemination. The work of Hana Miletić is not interested in bringing any of those past imaginations back to life. She is, above all, interested in the permanent negotiation between the visual, the haptic, the verbal, and the ancestral which was already constitutive of certain abandoned traditions in 20th-century modernism and which has reached a new crescendo in today’s exercise of recovering certain feminist art practices. Her work is unapologetically about an artist aware of this genderized way of looking at languages and media, intimacy and space, big and small narratives.