This small, poetic book was picked up at the poetry marathon at The Serpentine in London where the Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović's poetry was being performed. The work performed was a poem listing a word from each letter of the alphabet in turn and following it with the word 'pain'. It's power derived from the simplicity and beauty of the word pairings.
Simple in design, it has a plain grey cover only featuring the artists name and the title of the work 'oduzimanje nula' which translates as 'subtract zero'. The fourteen internal pages, made of semi-transparent tracing paper, each have a hand written sum/equation made up of only 0's, each subsequent page, has the same sum with one less zero , until there is nothing left on the final page.
Stilinović, is an experimental filmmaker, photographer and gallerist, most famous for his work “An Artist who Cannot Speak English is no Artist”, (1992). His work continually examines and questions language and the ideological signs and structures that define the world around us.
