Artist Statement
Since the early 1990s, my work has included creating conceptually based drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations. In the beginning, my artwork was repainted several times due to a lack of funds and materials. Growing up in socialist pre-war Yugoslavia left a huge emotional scar. Later, the post-socialist identity became my central and most influential media - my subject. Whether I was doing drawing, painting, installation or video installation, the post-socialist subject would often be present as a subconscious identity. I was not aware of it at first. The viewers would point it out.
I realized that post-socialist identity is present and cannot be amputated from personal history. Using nostalgia as an act of personal historical reality, I created a significant body of work. Paintings, installations and video installations were part of a large drawing on the wall. The subtle lines of the drawings along the gallery wall denoted time and the unbreakable connection between the identities that make up the whole. The drawing represented the connective tissue of intersectionality. During the three-month exhibition at the Art Gallery of Windsor (AGV), it became clear that this fabric of intersectionality, with all its similarities and contradictions, represents the whole of a unique identity at the epicentre of the gallery space. Discovering such a complex intersectional identity also meant embracing it.