Toys Are a Substitute for People

The exhibition by Biljana Willimon consists of three interconnected units. The first, which gives the entire exhibition its title — “Toys Are a Substitute for People” (a quote by the artist Mića Stajčić) — emerges from a deep connection to childhood. Carefully preserved drawings made by her granddaughters, Dunja and Zoja, form the foundation of a body of work developed over the past two and a half years. These paintings fuse original children’s drawings with Willimon’s own painterly interventions, creating an organic visual synergy.

Through this artistic gesture, Willimon questions the very purpose of art and the limits of creative freedom. An impressive wall installation — a hundred drawings and paintings radiating joy and playful brightness — “watches” the viewers from a cage labeled “Dunja and Zoja’s Zoo,” filled with worn and exhausted plush toys. These tender yet slightly unsettling figures raise a question of identification:
Are toys an extension of our emotions, or a refuge for them?

Anthropologically and psychologically, toys arise from humanity’s ancient need to understand and shape the world. The earliest dolls, found in Egyptian tombs, had ritual and educational functions — they served as mediators between the real and the imagined. Through play, a child learns to recognize emotions and develops the capacity for empathy.
Biljana Willimon translates this complex relationship into art, turning children’s play into a reflection on a contemporary world in which emotions are suppressed and empathy lost. Her symbolic use of the cage points to various frameworks — social, political, economic, philosophical, and even physical. Opposed to it she places play and experimentation as synonyms for freedom, which she sees as the foundation of artistic truth and joy.

Play has always been at the core of Biljana Willimon’s creative experience — whether in television, painting, or writing.

The second unit, a series of collages titled “Gallery of Secrets,” does not serve merely as an introduction to her media work. In each collage the artist uses her own face — recognizable to the public — subjecting it to expressive, at times almost violent and provocative treatment. The title alludes to her original TV programs, conceived as a form of televised happening in which the conventional talk-show format was subverted by artistic interventions taking place live before the viewers’ eyes. Through this cycle, Willimon reopens the question of boundaries — personal, but also those where art and everyday life meet.

At the center of the exhibition is the third unit — the cycle “My Heavenly World,” a wall-spatial installation conceived as a diary in images and words, created over several years. Intimate life motifs — longing, sorrow, pain, joy, and fear — intertwine with dark images of contemporary reality: wars, epidemics, and social injustice. Fourteen notebooks (Moleskine), filled with drawings from cover to cover, float on transparent supports in the middle of the room.

These unique artist’s books form a complete whole — a novel written with love, laughter, tears, irreverence, humor, and melancholy. Here, the “Heavenly World” becomes a metaphor for refuge — a place where fear dissolves and freedom and infinity begin.

Through these works, Willimon raises profound questions of ethics, the relationship between the personal and the common good, and the possibility of an ideal and just society — a world freed from error and violence. At the center of everything remains the human being — a creature that, despite everything, must not forget how to play, feel, and dream.

Ksenija Marinković