M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:11:00.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin .

Her project 19:30, 2010–2011, is about the fragile period in the mid-1990s, amidst the Yugoslav Wars, when the territories of the Former-Yugoslavia were disintegrating. The title of the work is the timeslot of the nightly news, which most of the population would follow in order to keep up with the latest developments. It is around this period in 1995 that electronic rave music, including a lot of Belgian hardcore, arrived in the former-Yugoslavia, a few years after its prevalence in other European nations. The music, possessing a certain feeling of newness, became popular amongst young people, allowing collective experiences of inclusivity and euphoric dance.

In 2010, Domanović began collecting an anthology of Yugoslav television news ident sequences and theme tunes dating from 1958 up until the present, after visiting television networks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia. She then asked numerous electronic music DJs and producers to remix the music samples to make new dance tracks. The video component of 19:30 uses some of these tracks, together with imagery that juxtaposes the idents with footage of rave parties. Looking simultaneously at these two kinds of collective experience, 19:30 provides a memory of the ambivalent feeling of both fear and exhilaration in a country that no longer exists.

19:30 continues as an ongoing project, including as a web anthology for the television news indents, and for further remixes.

www.nineteenthirty.net