“The subject of my work is the language of politics and its reflection on everyday life.” In this quote from 1984, Stilinović speaks of language as a tool for manipulation. Moving from painting to action, object, photography and artists’ books, Stilinović often used the collage technique and cut-outs in his work, referring to the artistic and social ideas of the Dada and avant-garde movements, where ideology, art and everyday life intersected the same way as in contemporary Yugoslavia. He made several collages from cut-out newspapers, banknotes and photographs, in which he manipulated the original meaning of the image by playing with the discordance between the elements. In Taken out from the Crowd, he cut out a few details from an ordinary photograph of a public space. Absence can be interpreted in several ways in this work, which is set in an Eastern European context. It may point to the contradictory situation between propaganda and informal public discourse, but it can also refer to the activity of censorship that decided on the artistic works, as Stilinović experienced. The bird’s eye view reminds us of the operation of the state security and its important tool, surveillance. Control was necessary to maintain the dictatorship, with oppositionists, young people, and artists constantly in focus, but the observers could single out anyone from the crowd if they seemed dangerous to the regime, as the title suggests. The work can also recall traumatic historical events that caused irreplaceable loss in the destiny of individuals and families, so the work touches its viewer through emotions as well. Krisztina Üveges