Exhibition Bombofon ▪︎ Nikola Macura

Accompanying program for the exhibition:

Tuesday, July 9, at 6 pm
Art Gallery, Knez Mihailova 6
Conversation and musical performance

Tuesday, July 9, at 8 pm
Square in front of the Belgrade Cultural Center
Musical performance: Rusty orchestra

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FROM NOISE TO SOUND

Describing his artistic practice as socially engaged, Nikola Macura emphasizes that most of his works also have a specific type of utilitarian value. In the latest project "From noise to sound", he uses the method of upcycling: finding and taking weapons and other props from military waste in Temerin, and transforming them into various musical instruments, such as the bombofon - a wind instrument made from projectiles/grenades for the M57 hand-held launcher. The practical value of these artistic objects lies in the ability to perform musical performances on them in collaboration with professional musicians and the 'Rusty orchestra', as Macura calls it. Through this artistic process, a range of possible problem frameworks are opened up for analyzing the relationship between the utility of art and its social, symbolic, or aesthetic functions.

... It is precisely these other functions of art, its utility, as well as the repurposing of materials imbued with a strong signifier of their original function - as is the case with weapons - that become the focal point of Nikola Macura's art project. Utilitarian objects that produced sounds of gunfire, explosions, bursts, or blasts during the anti-Yugoslav wars are translated into the world of utilitarian objects in the art system, whose function is the production of sounds, music, and compositions with a clear anti-war message. The purposefulness of the objects, i.e. musical instruments, is enriched by the artist through performative actions with additional symbolic content, so crucial at a time when strong tendencies of re-traditionalization, historical revisionism, and denial of crimes mark social currents in the region. Ultimately, by creating a new and different utilitarian aesthetic component of art, whose purposefulness is achieved through direct use, Macura speaks of the transformative potential of art.

(From the text On bombofon and the utilitarian value of art, Zoran Erić. You can read the full text HERE.)

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Nikola Macura, Master of Fine Arts, is an associate professor at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. He was born in Novi Sad in 1978. The artistic practice of Nikola Macura connects different media and involves installations and interventions in space, sculpture, and drawing primarily in the form of socially engaged art. After completing his studies, he actively exhibits in group and solo exhibitions in the country and abroad. Since 2000, he has participated in the large-scale Led Art performance 'Kunstlager', and from 2003 to 2013, he continuously participated in the work of the Multimedia Center 'Art Clinic'. In 2002, he realized his first installation placed in a public space, and in 2003, he exhibited the first in a series of interactive, procedural works from the 'Interactive Sculpture' series. To date, he has implemented a large number of interventions and installations, and his latest project, which is still in progress, deals with reexamining the relationship between sculpture and sound, or the process of redesigning military props into sound objects.