FRIENDLY CRITISISM or A SELF-PORTRAIT OF A PETIT BOURGEOIS
performance art
Nebojša Milikić, Belgrade (Serbia)

The performance deals with interpersonal relationships within a group of urban young people – our contemporaries who, during an unusual process initiated by one of the group members – giving away garments to the friends – discover certain political and ideological preferences of each other. By drawing attention of those who receive presents to their desirable or undesirable streaks of personality, the present-giver simultaneously outlines his own self-portrait – by criticising the very sides of his own personality that he can most easily identify in his friends.
The reasons and outcomes of this indirectly performed exchange of thoughts are presented in the form of a monodrama, by playing a seemingly neutral and informative lecture on the initiator, his friends and the items given as presents, in which the participants later pose before cameras. The audience can assume and guess the emotional and existential aspects of the interpersonal relationships, established after the recent redistribution of the resources of our society.