GOLDEN FLOWER CATHARSIS

This is a special flower called Catharsis – the purifier or Pericles’ flower.
Since ancient times, it has been known as the harbinger of a new golden cultural era. Legend has it that Pericles himself took it from Olympus and brought it to Athens, and thereafter, the Golden Periclean Age dawned upon the people of the city-state of Athens. By providence, this flower came into my dreams, and I placed it on Bežanijska Kosa, which I perceive as the Cultural Olympus, and from there, I scattered it throughout the city of Belgrade, in all the places from which this flourishing should first begin. Thus, it found its way during the night to a hundred crucial places in the city: Republic Square, in front of the City Hall, the State Parliament Building, Kalemegdan…
The path from Bežanijska Kosa to the old part of the city could rightly be called the Path of the Flower. In honor of the eternal glory of culture and its divine nature, this monument has been erected, to stand like Belgrade’s Victor, proclaiming that without spiritual purification – Catharsis, the victories of culture cannot be.
* Any resemblance of the golden flower to an everyday object that each of us has in our bathroom is intentional.

Golden flower

Golden flower revolves around artistic engagement that uses an ambiguous object – a giant, reversed golden toilet brush also resembling a flower, to directly counterpoise the dominant trends in transformations of urban spaces and environments. 
The reversed toilet brush symbolizes the series of necessary and assumed inversions from the perspective of the artist, with a sculpture that is originally situated in a suburb of Belgrade, Serbia, directly opposite centrally located sites, like the Victor Monument, deploying its double meaning. On the one side, it exhausts its formal ambiguity by presenting a reversed giant toilet brush stuck into the ground, pointing out the need to face the current realities of urban spaces. On the other, the sculpture simultaneously resembles a golden flower, thus emphasizing potentially positive interventions and direct artistic engagement that would eventually lead to novel paths in urban development. 
The concept itself directly tackles an apparent haste in refurbishing historic downtown Belgrade (Serbia) and general inclination towards becoming a global city that in effect has left its mark on urban development and the very treatment of issues, such as urban coexistence, social justice and the city landscape itself. While exhausting people’s feel of dissent towards these new refurbishments, it also makes the observer think about how the urban spaces are shaped, particularly in Eastern Europe.