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text from Weekend Art newspaper (Ivana Keser) 1999

Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill, a series of images by Aleksandar Battista Ilic taken exclusively on Sundays on the Medvednica mountain near Zagreb,(1995-2005). Accompanies the five-year long performance (at that time, Ed) by three artists: Aleksandar Battista Ilic, Ivana Keser, and Tomislav Gotovac. This project is about different relationships, about reality, life space, and artistic circumstances. Due to the circumstances in the region at the time when the work was started, idyllic Sunday walks across the mountain surrounded by friends had become rituals of personal freedom, as much as an action and a performance. It was time of difficult political situation in Croatia as well as new wars in Balkan. Images in this controversal project, exquisitely composed and whose light and colours are always perfect, exude serenity and calm, the tranquillity of a friendly complicity, and the simple pleasures of a life lived according to the regular rhythm of the seasons. But under the surface, the Weekend Art series is wrought by the profound evils which course through society and pierce bodies. It is not just a hymn to nature, the body and a simple life, but rather an aesthetic resistance to horror. By its nature, this work is a ‘performance without audience'. Using a process involving a self-timer, more than 3000 images were taken, and presented in the form of transparencies, posters, postcards, web sites, newspapers. As a series of images the project is actually a ‘film realized in slides'.