GOGBOT Shorts Blok 3

The Hero presents Marina Abramović seated motionless on a white horse, holding a large white flag as the Yugoslav national anthem plays. Drawing on the traditional image of the mounted military hero, Abramović strips the figure of conquest and action. The white flag—associated with surrender, truce, and peace—transforms an image historically tied to masculine authority and victory into one of stillness, vulnerability, and endurance.

The work is also an intimate act of mourning. Abramović created The Hero in memory of her father, Vojin Abramović, a Yugoslav partisan who fought against fascism during the Second World War. Against the disappearance of Yugoslavia and the violent nationalism of the 1990s, the work asks what remains of the heroic image once its promises of strength, patriotism, and military glory are emptied out. The only surrender, Abramović suggests through the work, may ultimately be to mortality itself.

Marina Abramović is a Serbian-born performance and conceptual artist whose work uses the body, duration, stillness, and endurance to explore physical and psychological limits, memory, violence, and the relationship between performer and audience. - Spain 2001 | 14'21

Patriotic is a short musical video work by Benny Nemer, made in collaboration with Pascal Lièvre. Through song, performance, and the visual language of pop culture, the work plays with the conventions through which national identity, belonging, and masculinity are performed. Rather than treating patriotism as a fixed political conviction, the artists approach it as something rehearsed: an emotional and aesthetic performance produced through familiar gestures, voices, and images.

The work belongs to a period in Nemer’s practice characterized by the critical mimicry of popular culture. By appropriating the seductive forms of music video and pop performance, Patriotic unsettles the distinction between sincere identification and parody, asking how collective identities are produced through repetition and spectacle—and what happens when those codes are performed through a queer body.

Benny Nemer is a Montreal-born artist, diarist, and researcher based in Paris. Working across video, sound, performance, writing, and participatory practices, his work explores the voice, emotion, queer histories, and the ways identities and relationships are mediated through cultural forms. - 2005 | 4'05"

Heart Transfer Paper is a collaborative video work by Tamarma and Yamadatesla. - 2026 | 4'05"