Installation with video documentation of a live performance, wall-engraved text, textile work, and wooden objects.
12.05.-30.06.2023
On Violence, Budapest History Museum - Budapest Gallery, curated by Lívia Páldi. Photographs by Tamás G. Juhász / Budapest Gallery.
The installation conveys the complexity and frustration arising from years of research dedicated to women’s unknown, undocumented, lost, forgotten, and marginalised histories.
The video documents the live performance Document Missing: Performance no. 6 (Daughter), presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje as part of the exhibition Ecstatic Bodies: Archive of Performative Queer Bodies, curated by Slavco Dimitrov and Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski within the framework of Skopje Pride Weekend 2022. The text for the performance is based on a feuilleton published in Borba in 1990 under the title Destroyed Past and Future, which recounts the betrayal, sentencing, and eventual expulsion from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia endured by Rosa Plaveva’s daughter, Nadezhda (Nada) Plaveva Stanojević, during the period known as Informbiro (1949–1953). The garment and the red wooden object are part of the performance and are exhibited as “action objects.”
The extracted curses from the performance—written in my English typeface Archetype Open Form—are engraved onto the wall using a technique I began in 2022. Through this forceful gesture, by scratching into the institutional wall surface, I perform the act of revealing what was hidden and uncovering what was forgotten.
Fairy Hair is a set of four wooden carvings that emphasise the process of female emancipation and the relationship between the political, social, and spiritual self and the community understood as a shared space. The writing process is simultaneously a carving process—traditionally a masculine and predominantly visual activity. The objects become minimal interpretations of domestic and art-historical narratives, as well as ideas drawn from feminist theory and the politics of representation.