Where Have All the Children Gone?

For the last decade Dejan Kaludjerović has been
preoccupied with childhood as a leitmotif in his
paintings, drawings, photography and videos. A
central theme in Kaludjerović‘s oeuvre is how we
deal with the present and therefore how it manifests
itself in the future. The artist strives to bring
to our consciousness the choices we are making
today and how they affect life that comes. Being
of a generation that was brought up in the seventies
Kaludjerović’s memory of childhood is of
an era where matters were not as exploited as in
today’s media saturated world. One of the largest
complications of memorializing our past is the inevitable
fact that it is absent. Every memory we try
to reproduce becomes a present that has already
past. It is this impractical desire for recalling what
is gone forever that brings to surface a feeling of
nostalgia, noticeable in many aspects of daily life.
Kaludjerović is very aware of this trap and utilizes
the past to point out how visual codes towards the
imagery of children have varied over time.

Artist statement Dejan KaludjeroviĆ

My work is mainly concerned with issues of responsibility
and manipulation. In other words, the
ways through how mass media, educational systems
or family contexts influence society;
My work explores the centrality of the image in
the Western society, the obsession of the society
with fear and violence and the structure and mechanisms
of capitalism. Also how capitalistic system
is using and manipulating with the images of
children, violence and sexuality in the media. My
work deals with the questioning of how society
perceives children in different periods and how this
is connected with the ideologies of society. I am
interested in the problem of the exploit of children
and the image of a child for commercial purposes.