The specific carnival-type experience of everyday social surroundings in the works of Vedran Perkov is realised through the appropriation, processing and recontextualisation of a broad range of popular culture. Perkov uses icons from the mass entertainment industry and consumer society as models for the realisation of various hybrid objects and environments where in their global iconographic recognisabiliti is confronted with a specific type of domesticated ubiquitous kitsch.
Authorial intervention is in evidence both in the reinterpretation of a motif and in its culturo-logical shift to a specific socio-political area, which determines is to a great extent.
Perkov explores the critical potential of signs, icons and symbols that have become exhausted, emptied of their original meaning due to excessive use. New meanings are shaped on the fringes, as the by-products of their further consumption, as a value surplus of sorts, realised contrapuntally to the original functions of signs, which almost always designate values like optimism, heroism, entertainment, childlike purity… What is evident in Vedran Perkov’s work is a lack of this kind of affirmation; motifs like dwarfs, teddy bears, Batman, smiley or balloons, which are present in this artist’s work, are only seemingly attractive and funny.
The unease which these objects produce stems both from their vague aesthetic status and the feeling of violence they evoke, regardless of whether is committied on them or whether they perform it themselves. It is precisely this peculiar vagueness and the ambivalent character of Vedran’s works that create a dynamic field which indirectly reflect the thematic issues of various forms of forgery, censorship, repression of collective and individual traums, impoverishment and media manipulation.