Radenko Milak & Roman Uranjek

Radenko Milak (1980) was born in Travnik, Roman Uranjek (1961) in Trbovlje, both cities were part of the former Yugoslavia. Uranjek, who died in Ljubljana in 2022, was a founding member of the artist group IRWIN and Neue Slovenische Kunst (NSK), both formed in the 1980s. The two artists worked together on their project DATES from 2014 until Uranjek’s death in 2022, recognising that both artists’ work was closely linked to cultural and political activism.

Uranjek created collages of images collected from different historical periods, in line with the aesthetics of avant-garde narratives. The language of his art highlights the problems of information overload, where the quantity of news and the speed of information dissemination overrides its relevance and quality. Milak reworks images from photojournalism into monochrome watercolors, insisting on the black and white nature of the images while also referring to their origins. Through their artworks, well-known or forgotten photographs of the 20th century are given new meaning.

Their shared vision of history, society and art was the source of their work. Their joint works have countless layers of meaning, creating contemporary art puzzles.