Dislocated Third Eye Series
– Bismillah
OM Production

SALT Galata, Floor -1

Dislocated Third Eye Series – Bismillah (1984)
Directed by Sulejman Ferenčak
Duration: 28’38”

Dislocated Third Eye Series – Bismillah is a series of blurred, stretched and streaking imagery, shot on super 8, in a mountainous landscape, the camera repeatedly whirling like a dervish.

Slobodan Valentincic swims immersed, tossing and turning in a pre-dream state of rapid eye movement. Now and then you see a tripod, a body jumping, the cameraman is spinning his tripod around like a shot-put that never takes off, with a camera at the end of it. Bismillah sits inside a spinning top, a field of tension linking mobility and stasis. The body holds centre stage. What builds is an artist pushing the landscape, simultaneously shrugging it off and wrapping himself inside it. This unstable relationship is re-iterated by its screening framework, the OM Archive as cocoon inside which Valentincic cloaks this work. Or, the other way around, the Bismillah’s cinematic blurs and streaks are the OM Archive’s “unverifiable hearsay and innuendo” performed and rendered materially present. (Extract from Two Artists by Dirk de Bruyn, Nero Magazine, 2013)


A mysterious collective, OM Production had an energetic output in sound and vision and Dislocated Third Eye Series – Bismillah is just one of 41 films produced by them in Slovenia between 1977 and 1987. A film in four parts it is a study of perception, the chemical formula of adrenaline directly translated into filmic expression.

Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana