Miloš Trakilović explores the affective power of language, and the conditions that emerge during times of ideological conflict. Often drawing from his own experience of war and displacement, Trakilović offers a critique of visible and invisible power structures, as well as our own complicity within them. Trained in Experimental Film and New Media Art, he holds an MFA from UdK, the University of Arts in Berlin. Through his practice, Trakilović finds new ways to give form to abstract theoretical material. As he said in an interview with Badland (where he now serves as Editor-at-Large), “Articulation might very well be the new twentieth century abstraction of our time; it’s a lauded virtue within a milieu of all-encompassing information”.

Trakilović often models his performances on the format of the academic lecture, directly addressing his audience while adeptly connecting seemingly disparate information and ideas. With collaborators Hito Steyerl and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Trakilović developed the 2019 work MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE, which considered the future of visual culture in the age of algorithmic governance. Premiering at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK), the work explored the profound political reverberations tied to the pace of technological innovation, as manifest in cultural artefacts that bridge high and low culture: namely, high fashion and its shadow self—the bootleg, counterfeit form. As Kolja Reichert wrote about the work in 032C: “this is theory in freefall; theory for a world of preventive crime prediction and anticipatory governance, where images no longer represent but predict and manufacture reality, and where people don’t simply sit in front of screens anymore but are themselves nodes in a network flooded with cultural content that they consume and forward.”

While in residence, Trakilović prepared his solo exhibition which opened at Callie’s in September 2020, in collaboration with FRAGILE. The new work All but War Is Simulation took a document from the war in Bosnia as its starting point: a soon-to-be refugee’s Post-It note detailing a list of possessions to take before the family’s eviction. The list consisted almost entirely of technological paraphernalia. Touched by the note’s poetic nature and political implications, Trakilović worked with artist Hans-Henning Korb to recreate the listed items, which were then incorporated in a 2-channel video installation interrogating the representation and reality of war.