Mio Vesović: Rosebud II

In 1985. Mio Vesović made Rosebud - a series of twelve black and white photographs of a nude man flogging his penis with a thorny stem. Twenty-four years later he repeated the action. Rosebud and Rosebud II are works that bear numerous discourses. They both represent resistance against the dominant model of male heroism, Oedipus' imprisonment in the closed cycle of constant tension with no possibility of relief, and comment on the desperate circumstances of the post-socialist Balkans, where a ritual of bodily mutilation makes its protagonist a contemporary martyr who thus expresses his resistance against the authority of political and economic elites.