Želimir Žilnik
Želimir Žilnik, Vienna, 30 October 2020
“For me, television was an inner tube after I’d gone overboard”
At the exhibition “Shadow Citizens” devoted to him by Kunsthalle Wien in 2020, the Serbian film and TV director Želimir Žilnik provides a witty survey of his oeuvre, presented to the public as early as 1969 (“Early Works”) at the film festival Berlinale, an oeuvre that was repeatedly confronted with bans and censorship and quite often succeeded in bypassing such obstacles with various tricks—including on Yugoslav state television, so suspect to so many cineastes. Many of his works, including “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” (1975), take “people under pressure who have no space, no context in which to express themselves” as their starting point.
“For me, television was an inner tube after I’d gone overboard”
At the exhibition “Shadow Citizens” devoted to him by Kunsthalle Wien in 2020, the Serbian film and TV director Želimir Žilnik provides a witty survey of his oeuvre, presented to the public as early as 1969 (“Early Works”) at the film festival Berlinale, an oeuvre that was repeatedly confronted with bans and censorship and quite often succeeded in bypassing such obstacles with various tricks—including on Yugoslav state television, so suspect to so many cineastes. Many of his works, including “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” (1975), take “people under pressure who have no space, no context in which to express themselves” as their starting point.