GRAZ.- Milica Tomić’s solo exhibition On Love Afterwards opens up a space in which we actively engage with pressing questions of courage, memory, political violence, and social asymmetries. Through artistic research and collective practice, she addresses these themes. She illuminates them from different angles, deciphering historical events linked to the political and social reality of the region of former Yugoslavia and contemporary circumstances.

The exhibition’s title deliberately introduces the concept of love, which at first glance hardly coincides with works that speak of political resistance, political crime, genocide, and exploitation. Love in this context comes as an antipode with the attempt to find another language, another way of thinking about those difficult topics, historical and recent events that mark the present moment. One of the first works that we encounter in the exhibition is a video work, which also gave the exhibition its name and it is a quote by the poet Radovan Zogović. While the protagonists of the video On Love Afterwards are telling us about their experience and motivation for joining the resistance and anti-fascist movement during World War II, their statements reveal personal responsibility, courage, love, and faith in a better tomorrow.

The exhibition presents Milica Tomić’s practice that spans over 30 years in its wholeness and includes a selection of works that are expanded and complemented by archival material. The fluid and not precisely defined boundary between artistic work and research is reflected in the very concept of the exhibition architecture, which provides background and insight into her individual and collective practice.

One of the central works in the exhibition is a multi-layered piece titled The Portrait of My Mother. After the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, Milica Tomić films a walk through the city. While tracing a path that reveals layers of the city, the viewer gains insight into the artist’s complex relationship with her mother, while opening a dialogue between the artist, the urban landscape, and an intimate history deeply intertwined with the political. The installation centers around an absent object, represented by an image of a large-scale tapestry made by the artist’s mother. The sculptural tapestry no longer exists; it was discarded by the artist herself. Only a slide remains. The piece consisted of knots and weaving—a technique frequently used by female artists in the former Yugoslavia. For Tomić, the knot in itself carries layered meanings; beyond its material form, it evokes the Borromean knot—a psychoanalytic model that articulates the interweaving of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. In this context, the knot becomes a structure of subjectivation, binding individual identity to collective memory, trauma, and the political unconscious.

The concept of a knot is also emphasized through her newly produced sculpture, which is made of an experimental material in collaboration with scientists from the Technical University of Graz, who developed a procedure for hardening the material through the growth of organic spores. In this sense, the artistic practice of Milica Tomić summarizes interdisciplinary thinking and the creation of knowledge that transcends traditional disciplines.

Another important aspect of Milica Tomić’s work is the question of the relationship between work and its value. In many of her works, she deals with various political realities, which were influenced by her personal experience of witnessing the privatization processes and political transformation from socialism to capitalism, which was strongly linked to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the war that followed.

Through her projects, Milica Tomić moves between individual and collective modes of artistic practice, experimenting and looking for new forms of collectivity. She is a founding member of the Yugoslav art and theory group Spomenik Group, as well as the interdisciplinary project and working group Four Faces of Omarska. Her work within the Spomenik Group is shaped by a rigorous engagement and the collective’s effort to establish the conditions under which art and theory can generate its own discourse on genocide and the contemporary state of permanent war. The group holds that genocide is fully speakable—but only through the languages of politics and the critique of ideology. This approach continues in Four Faces of Omarska, where Tomić engages in dialogue with critical research platforms such as Forensic Architecture.

Tomić’s work often begins from personal and individual histories, using them as points of entry to interrogate broader structures of power, and her practice exposes the structural and systemic conditions that enable political violence and injustice. At the same time, she interrogates the erosion of personal responsibility that sustains such systems— echoing concerns famously articulated by Hannah Arendt.

The performative approach of her works and the exhibition itself is emphasized by the architecture, which invites visitors to actively engage with these themes, to browse through the texts and images, and to read and interpret them on own terms. Parallel to the exhibition a catalogue will be published in July.

Milica Tomić works in the mediums of photography, video, installation art, and discursive, educational art, performance, and socio-political engagement. She has served as the Chair of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology in Austria since 2014.

Some of the works were produced in cooperation with the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.