Suppressed Reality
video, sound, 1:16, 2025The footage, captured in slow motion on February 24, 2025, in Novi Sad, Serbia, documents an ongoing cycle of daily student protests. These actions erupted after the deaths of sixteen people caused by the collapse of a canopy at the newly renovated train station, an emblem of infrastructural corruption and state negligence.
In a prolonged single shot, protesters bombard a police cordon with flour, eggs, yogurt, toilet paper, and red paint. The riot shields and armored uniforms absorb the materials, becoming unintended canvases of political expression. What begins as confrontation slowly morphs into a choreographed abstraction: textures spill, drip, and accumulate on the asphalt in painterly excess.
A dense sonic fabric of voices, whistles, impacts, and boots forms a dissonant mass, neither chant nor chaos, but something suspended in between. The auditory space becomes saturated, echoing a collective exhaustion as much as resistance. Temporality is stretched, tension becomes suspended. In this manipulated duration, reality is not only slowed but rendered unstable, caught between spectacle and breakdown, between visual poetry and institutional violence.
The work forms part of the ongoing cycle "Self-Sustaining System of Absurdity" where mechanisms of control, decay, and improvisation expose the paradoxes of late technopolitical realities.