Mladen Stilinović was a Croatian conceptual artist and one of the leading figures of the so-called "New Art Practice" which developed in Yugoslavia in the late 1970s. Stilinović was also a part of the Group of Six Authors, active in Zagreb from 1975 to 1979. Over the course of his career, he developed a grammar involving concepts like money, time, power, pain, work, and language. He sustains a constant exercise of resistance waged from a standpoint of absurdity and irony against systems of power and their apparatuses of reproduction. Stilinović’s works have been shown in many institutional settings including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Istanbul Biennial; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; documenta 12, Kassel; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; the Venice Biennale; and many others. 

Mladen Stilinović created the cycle Exploitation of the Dead in the period from 1984 to 1990. It is one of his most complex works, tackling what he saw as the exploitation of defunct movements in painting – Suprematism, Socialist Realism, and geometric abstraction. Exploitation of the Dead is a cycle of paintings, collages, objects, photographs, and texts that deal with the theme of the dissolution or disappearance of symbols, both those that are widely accepted, like the Christian cross, and those used during the Yugoslav socialist period, such as the red star. Through the appropriation of symbols and forms, Stilinović detected changes that affected the socialist system at a symbolic level in the 1980’s and subverted them through art, using ideological and political reality. The cycle Exploitation of the Dead has been exhibited several times in exhibitions around the world, most famously at documenta, Kassel in 2007.