On the occasion of 140 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Montenegro and Italy and 13 years since the restoration of Montenegrin independence, the exhibition “Eros, blood and holiness” by Dimitrija Popović and Dr. Anastazija Miranović was opened in Rome last night.
It is a multidisciplinary art and fashion project that was presented to the Montenegrin audience in Cetinje last year and which contains the eponymous exhibition of paintings by Dimitri Popović, his book dedicated to biblical women – Judith, Salome and Mary Magdalene, as well as a specially made collection by the art historian and fashion designer Dr. Anastasia Miranović.
At the opening of the exhibition, the Minister of Culture of Montenegro, Aleksandar Bogdanović, the Ambassador of Montenegro to Italy, Dr. Sanja Vlahović, and the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Italy, Emanuela Claudia del Re, spoke.
“The correspondence between the art works of Dimitri Popović and the fashion creations of Anastazija Miranović takes place in the punctuation of symbolic and archetypal points in the triangle of erotic, bodily and sacred, and all this in the context of the reinterpretation of the excess of the feminine, both in myth and in history,” he said, opening exhibition, Minister Aleksandar Bogdanović.
He pointed out that Dimitrije Popović, with a significant part of his oeuvre, showed a special interest in all those appearances of the female principle in which blood and eros disturbed the often overemphasized transcendence of great stories, making the concept of sanctity spill over into life itself.
“Dimitrije Popović is an artist who clearly refers to the rich heritage of such artistic subversions, but his works also reveal all those speculative provocations that made the body one of the most present themes of twentieth-century theory, which we find especially in the works of Michel Foucault. That is why it can be said that Popović belongs to that provocative line of contemporary art in which a kind of semiotics of the body is realized in an artistic way”, emphasized Bogdanović and added that in his works those delicate relations between the body and history are visible, from which the body appears to us as a disruptive factor to any power that aspired to monolith, and the female body was subject to the highest degree of censorship in such aspirations.
The Minister of Culture of Montenegro stated that Anastazija Miranović transposed Popović’s rebellion against dogmatic assumptions, embodied in the defense of the feminine as disruptive, into creations that, with their emblematic nature, bring the necessary dose of provocation to the proclaimed restraint of female appearance, which was insisted on by both patriarchy and puritanism as well as all other conservative ideological concepts.
“Therefore, these items of clothing can be experienced as a kind of correspondence to the painstaking story of a woman’s step forward from the limited space of privacy, which was limited by history and tradition alike. “Anastazija Miranović’s creations are a striking signifier of female individuality, and its roots, among other things, can be found precisely in the fates of Judith, Salome and Maria Magdalena, whose actions helped Dimitri Popović to create a kind of register of female subjectivity and subversiveness,” concluded Bogdanović.
The opening of the exhibition “Eros, blood and sanctity” was attended by a large number of dignitaries from cultural and political life, among others the UNESCO director for science and culture for Europe, Ana Luiza Massot Thompson – Flores; Director General of ICCROM, Webber Ndoro; representatives of the diplomatic corps, the Italian parliament and institutions, rectors and university professors.
The event was organized with the help and support of the Embassy of Montenegro in Rome.