Supermat Belgrade

Era Milivojević is one of the pioneers of the Yugoslav conceptual art and the author who worked in numerous fields, including performance, painting, collage and video installations. In the 70s he acted as part of the informal Group of Six Artists (Grupa šestoro umetnika), gathered around the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, which included Marina Abramović, Zoran Popović, Dragoljub Raša Todosijević, Neša Paripović and Gergelj Urkom. They were all part of the radical new approach to art, and Milivojević remained consistent with his methods, always playful and experimental, until his death in 2021.

Supermat (Super-checkmate) was the end result of Milivojević's performance in 2004. In this work, the artist describes the moves in 6 games played between Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue computer in 1997, the first in which Artificial Intelligence (or rather - a machine) won against the famous human champion. Milivojević considered this moment to be as important as the first human incursion into space and decided to repeat the game using his usual medium of tape, first in front of the Faculty of Philosophy and then on this mural at the Vuk Karadžić Cultural Center.

Chess was one of Milivojević's passions, and the representation of the game, graphically and linearly, became the basis of a whole spectrum of his works. Luckily, one of them - Supermat - is available for visit day and night, in the form of street art that will catch your attention with its intriguing abstract lines. And you can return to read them as many times as you want.