Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Rodchenko

 

I got myself a little present.

A little booklet Sergeiu Eseninu (To Sergei Esenin) of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky. This is the first edition that published in 1926. The booklet was designed by Alexander Rodchenko, and it's also including his photomontages.

Mayakovsky's lyric and angry elegy is written in response to fellow poet and provocateur Sergei Esenin's suicide with Rodchenko's arresting visual contributions.

 

 

"Fake For Real"

I just received a catalogue for the show Fake For Real, A history of Forgery and Falsification. The show is on display in the House of European History. It's a project of the European Parliament.

One of the posters from my collection of posters for the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition in Belgrade in 1941 is included. It's part of the show titled A Fake Conquers The World, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Here is a short quote of the organizer explaining the show:
"In the routine of daily life, the sensational, spectacular and supernatural are sweet seduction. They allow us to escape the ordinary. But the game of deception is only fun when we have agreed to it. When we are deliberately deceived, we are on the losing side in many regards, losing our money, credibility, integrity or even our existence.

While the current quantity of (dis)information is unprecedented, the problem is an ancient one. History is filled with countless examples of fake masquerading as real. The Trojan Horse, a mythological archetype of deception, symbolically links ancient history to very contemporary problems of the internet-dominated world.

From the lessons of the past, a roadmap can be pieced together: one that lets us wander into the realm of the fantastical and fabricated when we want to, while providing an exit strategy for when we are ready to return to reality."

 

JDP, Yugoslav Drama Theatre

JDP Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia is having a premiere of the new play Siroka zemlja (Undiscovered Country) by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzleron on Tuesday, June 17th.

With this play, I wrapped up my four seasons of designing posters for JDP. It has been a pleasant experience for me despite the turbulences in the past year. The theatre only managed to put out only three new shows in season 2019-2020. But in season 2020-2021, despite the Covid-19 infection of staff and actors, cancellations and reschedulings of shows and openings, the theatre still managed to have five new shows on the stage.

Not a small achievement!

Here you can see the high-res images of the JPD posters here.

 

"Undiscovered Country" posters

 

Latin and Cyrillic version of the poster Siroka zemlja (Undiscovered Country) for Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade, Serbia.

Undiscovered Country (Das weite Land) is a play by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, which focuses on 1890s Viennese society, demonstrating the effects of upper class codes of behavior on human relationships.

"A play that combines detailed psychology with a portrait of a society.... What the play shows us is couples indulging in a polite sexual excuse me behind which lurks panic, death and an insane preoccupation with honour.... What is fascinating is that the action is conducted against a background of tennis parties, trips to the Dolomites, charade like affairs and summerhouse banter against Art Deco panels. Everything suggests a world of golden leisure and civilized deceit. But what Schnitzler shows us is the corrosive effect of habitual lying on this Smiles of a Summer Night' atmosphere and the destructive impact of the hero's contaminated sense of honour. I think it's a marvelous play because it pinpoints decadence with wit and irony."

Tolerance Poster in the altar room of St. Markus München Church

As a part of the Tolerance Poster Show in Kunstareal München District, in Germany, the St. Markus München church displayed Tolerance posters on the construction scaffoldings around it.

 

On top of that, the minister of the church also decided to display the poster by Angie Wang, a US designer, in the altar room of the church. 

 

The church seems to be the appropriate and the right place for tolerance.

We are thankful to the minister for doing this.

 

 

Call for Solidarity and Togetherness by High School Students from Rijeka

I am happy to share with you this news that appeared yesterday in the Croatian newspaper Novi list. One of those beautiful side effects of the Tolerance Poster Show.

"For the next week, the windows of the City of Rijeka on Korzo will be decorated with posters of students from the First Croatian Gymnasium in Rijeka and children from the My Place Under the Sun program at the Center for the Culture of Dialogue. 

The posters that will be placed on Tuesday carry important messages from students and call for solidarity, and were created as a continuation of the international Erasmus + project »p.s. Initiate Solidarity ”which is being implemented in France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia, where 24 schools are involved in the project, and the holder is the Center for Peace Studies in Zagreb. 

PRHG students previously sent postcards to their fellow citizens with messages indicating various social problems, and later, under the leadership of Diana Rosatti, Helena de Karina and Nataša Kuzmar Colnar, they made posters, while some of the posters were created during the collaboration of students 1.d . classes and children from the My Place Under the Sun program. 

The posters on Korzo were created as a reaction of students to the exhibition "Tolerance" by Mirko Ilić, and the goal of the exhibition and all activities is to encourage citizens to think about the society in which they live and act in solidarity so that everyone lives in a better world."

 

A.C.2020.5

Here is the fifth part of my visual essay A.C.2020. I created them to express the anxiety and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The visual essay is comprised of self-contained single-page stories.

The first page is my take on Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. As Steven Heller eloquently put in his The Daily Heller blog: "Throughout the pandemic, Mirko Ilic has evoked his own emotional spectrum (light to dark) through a continuous series of sequential images... 'Little Mirko in COVID Land,' so clearly expresses the common angst—a universal feeling of, at once, isolation, separation, lamentation, liberation and, now, the undefinably discomfiting excitation of being released back into a (hopefully) COVID-free world."

The second page is about the deserted Lincoln Center in New York City which evokes association to Giorgio de Chirico's painting.

You can see more high-res images of this comic series here.