Black Square Returns, 2025, animation, 3’ 42’’ 

Black Square Returns is a fictional speculation executed through drawing and frame-by-frame animation. At the same time, it serves as a meditation on past, present, and potential future military catastrophes, my personal homage to the science fiction film genre, and a dialogue with great visual artists of the past known for their bold use of black: Goya, Malevich, Ad Reinhardt…

On the pages of the Military Encyclopedia found, which includes twelve extensive, hardbound books printed in the sixties of the twentieth century in FR Yugoslavia, frames and sequences of various science fiction films and horror television series are drawn. The books are sorted alphabetically, record and define the wealth of militant terms, the historical development of the military industry, kinds and types of weapons, as well as approaches to air, land and sea forms of warfare.

The narrators whose monologues introduce and accompany us through the animated film are the famous film director, the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, and television star and painting instructor Bob Ross. Their drawn characters engage in a unique kind of dialogue with the viewer, asking questions and addressing the camera directly, simultaneously suggesting and disrupting the film’s content: “Have you ever had a premonition? A feeling that something dreadful was about to happen? Today we’re gonna start with white canvas and we’re gonna use some magic black on it….” – these are just some of their lines used in the film.

On the other hand, the real “heroes” of this animation are military personnel, people on a forest trip, passengers at the train station, visitors to famous museums… who are in a state of fear, panic, and alarm. What haunts the heroes of this animated film are not unidentified aircraft and autonomous weapons of the present or future, but The Black Square that appears as a shadow, the spirit of avant-garde revolutionary art, the zero point of painting. Malevich’s painting created in 1915 here becomes not only a mysterious object (McGuffin), which is the initiator of the plot, but also symbolizes the unknown, a portal to the void that expands, multiplies, sucks everything in front of it: land and see, time and space. The Black Square, with its rigid, rectilinear form, from the moment of its creation was considered a window into another reality, a portal that leads to the end but also to a new beginning, moving along the line between darkness and light, positivity and negativity. Thus, in this short film, The Black Square remains both a hero and an antihero.

With a series of drawings and an animated film called Black Square Returns, I wanted to open a space for erasing the linear and hierarchical observation of reality, the border between foreground and background rules, abstraction and narration. The Black Square that floats through the landscapes and interiors drawn on the pages of the Military Encyclopedia is at the same time a protest and a need for silence, an illustration of a black hole that sucks objects and light within its orbit, but also a call to rethink both abstraction and reality.

Contributors: editing – Nemanja Petrović, original score – Pavle Popov, photos – Nina Ivanović