Lego Kalashnikov
Croatia
2020
In 1991, as Croatia declared its independence, the new president, Franjo Tudjman, announces that all Croat children must know about the enemy of Croatia before they even learn to read and write. As a Croat child, Lana Mesic was among those directly targeted by this announcement. Although she was not fully aware of it, she was brought up to think that the Croats’ enemy was omnipresent. During the war, the sound of sirens would send these very children hiding in nuclear fallout shelter. Lana Mesi remembers the one located under her family’s flat, where she played for hours with her friends.
One of their favourite games consisted of re-enacting scenes that took place above them, miming movements inspired by war films. She remembers their pistols exploding and shattering after being manipulated too many times. She remembers being very skilled at fixing them. She remembers that they looked so good, you could have sworn that these Kalashnikovs could have fired real bullets. In game as in life, however, she never saw the enemy, nor ever found out whether it really existed.
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About the artist
Born in 1987 in Croatia, Lana Mesić now lives and works in Rotterdam. She is represented by the LhGWR gallery in The Hague. She graduated from the photography school of AKV St Joost Academy in Breda, the Netherlands, in 2010 and obtained a Master’s there in 2012.
Lana Mesić’s work addresses mainly how the mind constantly wrestles with things that have no image. With curiosity, she analyses how we subjectively or collectively fill these visual blanks.