Curators: Emma Enderby, Léon Kruijswijk

Assistant Curator: Linda Franken

Not a Love Song is the first institutional solo exhibition of the Bosnian-Dutch artist Miloš Trakilović (b. 1989, BA) in Germany, who lives and works between Berlin and Amsterdam.  His practice encompasses time-based media and installation, through which he questions how technological advancements and processes of digitalization affect human perception, frequently focusing on contemporary warfare, its mediatization, and its lingering consequences. At KW, Trakilović presents a site-specific adaptation of his newest installation 564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song), for which he works with artificial intelligence (AI) to probe more recent history. AI is arguably the predominant technology of the present and the near future. It accumulates existing information and uses algorithms to calculate outcomes and project future probabilities by finding correlations between patterns. Seeing the future through AI today means working with data from the past and present.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the war in Bosnia (1992–1995)—later resulting in mass expulsions as well as the genocide of thousands of Bosnian Muslims—had not yet erupted, though the tensions leading to Yugoslavia’s years-long violent dissolution were already palpable. For 564 Tracks, Trakilović revisits music from Yugoslavia made in these three years leading up to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. The artist trained an AI model with audio material recorded in war zones, allowing it to subsequently detect correlating tonalities in Yugoslav music produced between 1989 and 1992, which resulted in a library of sounds extrapolated from 564 tracks. In the exhibition, a second AI model recomposes these extrapolated sounds according to melodic structures and qualities commonly found in love songs, creating an ever-changing score. This ‘unsingable’ love song is accompanied by live-generated, hallucinatory visuals that respond directly to the sound. The notion of continuity is further reflected in the spatial installation. Charred objects evoke a dystopian atmosphere—an abandoned recording studio where work appears to have once been in progress.

With 564 Tracks, Trakilović raises questions such as: How did the rising political tensions resonate in music? Was impending catastrophe already palpable in the musical productions of that time? Could war thus have been predicted in music? The work discloses to what degree societies, perhaps subconsciously, are capable of foreseeing war, and reshapes a pre-conflict audio social milieu into a composition that haunts through the present. By doing so, it proposes to consider the extent to which cultural production might prefigure crises and offers a lens through which to reflect on both past and present conflicts and their lasting echoes.

Artist Bio

Miloš Trakilović is a Bosnian-Dutch artist (b. 1989, BA). He received a BFA and MFA from the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he graduated in Experimental Film and New Media Art. His practice revolves around the politics of perceptibility, exploring issues of dissolution, fragmentation, memory and loss. His topical interest is in the role of vision in the construction of meaning and the production of power after the digital turn. Trakilović’s work is primarily concerned with digital and time-based media, with film, video and installation as central elements.

Colophon

Curators: Emma Enderby, Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
Head of Production: Claire Spilker
Technical Management: Wilken Schade
Head of Installation, Media Technology: Markus Krieger
Installation Team: KW Installation Team
Live Programmer: Nikolas Brummer
Registrar: Bryn Veditz
Head of Communication and Press: Marie Kube
Head of Communication and Marketing: Anna Falck-Ytter
Online Communication and Online Marketing: Haja Camara
Student Assistant Communication: Isabella de Arruda Ilg
Head of Education and Mediation: Alexia Manzano
Text and Editing: Léon Kruijswijk, Linda Franken
Translation and Copy-Edit: Georg und Katrin Hiller von Gaertringen, Sabine Wolf, Simon Wolff
Academic Trainee: Aykon Süslü
Interns: Kimia Godarzani-Bakhtiari, Louison Jenkins, Joséphine Richard, Guilherme Vilhena Martins, Yicheng Xie

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