Move from your place! It is not a warning! It is a serious threat. Superstition in this area is a system of micro-prohibitions, a map of small tyrannies that cling to the body. The bag on the floor, a broken mirror, a black cat on the road… all of these are instructions on how to… survive in a world that cannot be tamed? Superstition is learned through movement. Through reflex. And so the hand knocks on wood entirely on its own! Marija Mandić enters the space between faith and habits. The knife facing up represents the performance of the body that agrees to be unruly. Repeating gestures that are deeply unhappy at the root of the West Balkans, the artist makes small provocations. Muscle memory breaks, forcing the body to struggles with its own automated obedience. These rituals are a way for the body to engage in combat. With just a gesture, you stop evil, avoid an accident and here it is - famous apparent control. People have always been prone to phantasms. But when you repeat them without beliefs, they become empty gestures that show how deep the control that enters under the skin. The knife facing upwards acts as the body's laboratory. How much we still belong logic of fear? Superstitions are not isolated coincidences: they are collective rules, transmitted in the family, at the table, in language. Their function is structural. It is about parallel code, an unwritten law that shapes behavior and produces social cohesion. Superstition is an economy of meaning. It bridges the gap between events and interpretation, offering body and language a framework in which contingency becomes predictable. Such rituals form the micropolitical network of everyday life. They discipline through repetition. The body learns where to sit, what to avoid, how to amortize with a gesture danger. The subject is not born free, but immediately entangled in a network of petty prohibitions and conditioned actions. Superstition, then, is a pedagogy of power – one that does not come from above, through the institution, but from below, through family intimacy, through persistent gestures. In that logic, Heritage is not neutral: it is not just the transmission of culture, but the transmission of norms that legitimize a certain form of community. Superstitions shape community not by produce a rational system, but by naturalizing the connection between the sign and consequences. Marija Mandić intervenes precisely in this apparatus. She exposes the mechanism repetitions by sabotaging it, performing gestures "against the rules". In doing so, she deciphers inheritance, opening the question of which of these patterns functions as a common sign, and which as a control mechanism. What is passed down through generations is not only rituals, but also the very logic of conditional connection. The belief that the world is only possible if we constantly train it.
Text: Isidora Branković
Marija Mandić completed her undergraduate studies at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. majoring in New Visual Media (2013). Upon completion of her studies, she was awarded the Little Prince Award and the award from Matica Srpska and the Academy of Arts for excellent results achieved in the field art. She completed her master's degree in Photography and New Media (2015) at Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem (Czech Republic) where in 2022. defended her PhD in the field of visual arts on the topic "Reli(e)ving Memory: Representations of Collective and Individual Remembrance through Late 20th and 21st Century Photographic Practices". From 2016 to 2019, she worked as a doctoral student lecturer at the Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem, master's studies Department of Photography. She is a multiple scholarship holder of the Dositeja Fund for Young Talents of the Republic of of Serbia, and a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic. She is a finalist for the award Mangelos for 2023, and for her artistic work Bela Pčela was awarded a VID grant Foundation (2021) and the Fotograf photography festival award (2022). Over the years she had has numerous exhibitions in the country and abroad.
