Miloš Trakilović
Not a Love Song
15 February – 4 May 25
Miloš Trakilović, 564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song), 2024, Mixed Media. Photo: Sander van Wettum.
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 includes time-based media and installation, through which he questions how technological advancements and processes of digitalization affect human perception, with a frequent focus on contemporary warfare, its mediatization and its lingering consequences.
The exhibition includes Trakilović’s most recent installation 564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song), a project for which he works with artificial intelligence (AI) to probe more recent history. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the war in Bosnia (1992–1995)—which resulted 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 this work, the artist revisits Yugoslav music made in the three years leading up to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. He trained an AI model with audio material recorded in war zones, allowing it to subsequently detect correlating tonalities in the music of this era, which resulted in a library of sounds extrapolated from 564 tracks. In the exhibition, a second AI model recomposes these sounds according to melodic structures commonly found in love songs. The ever-changing score is accompanied by live-generated, hallucinatory visuals, all set within an installation that evokes a dystopian production studio.
With 564 Tracks, Trakilović raises questions such as: How did the rising political tensions resonate in music? Was impending catastrophe already discernible sonically? The work 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.
Curators: Emma Enderby, Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
Supported by
