The Perfect White Cisgender Woman
A short film, 2022, 6:00
The Perfect White Cisgender Woman is a satirical video in black and white, sketch style, 6 min, about a middle-class woman performing everyday rituals. The film examines human behavior in a pseudo-scientific way. It depicts a woman in a detached manner, functioning in a room, as though she is a subject of observation. The tone of world-weary detachment is created through a voice-over providing comments on her mundane actions.
Camera: Mina Petrović
PRIVATE THOUGHTS IN PUBLIC CRISIS
ARTIST BOOK, ONGOING PROJECT, 2021
Like Water, TOP, Berlin, 2022)
This installation works in favor of private revolutions that are mostly invisible. Short texts are engraved in the book as transparent letters with a debossing design. Statements offer a whimsical, sarcastic, and critical stance toward world events we have endured during the lockdown. It shares one’s view of the world’s issues from the couch in our comfort zone. The first ten texts are statements about the political situation in Palestine that we witnessed this spring in 2021 and are expressed by a white, privileged person. The project continues via a QR code that leads the individual to an Instagram profile, where everyone can share their thoughts on any problematic social issue. These are published publicly and anonymously.
CHIMNEY SWEEPING
PERFORMANCE, 20:00, 2020
Producer: MSUV- Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Serbia.
Performer: Nenad Ignjatević
Photographer: Marko Ercegović
Video Documentation: Alpha Media Plus
Curated by: Sanja Kojić Mladenov, Tijana Filipov Mezei
The artist with this performative piece is implementing the narrative of domestic violence treated in the Balkans. When paraphrasing national Serbian law and the definition of domestic violence, the performer intervenes with personal anecdotes. It illustrates the emotional impact and fills the void of the rigid bureaucratic system of the state apparatus.
APARTMENT 102
VIDEO 03:40, 2019
Camera and edit: Maximilian Klamm
Hommage to Jadranka Cigelj, Nusreta Sivac, and the rest of the women survivors of the concentration camp in Omarska, BiH.
The video asks questions about the experience of trauma and takes us into a complex field of transgenerational collective trauma caused by war violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Apartment 102 does not stop at re-experiencing trauma. At the moment when questions culminate into Do you wish you didn’t survive?, the black-and-white film changes into a colored one, the sound of a whirr appears, and the artist answers the question from the beginning of the film: To stay silent or to speak? The author adopts a strong standpoint that violence is unacceptable, she empowers victims and directs her attention to the perpetrators of violence. The video thus acquires the look of a historical document helping us to see the pores through which traumatic experiences are inscribed into collective history. Meanwhile, it connects us with the implications of the past, which have become ingrained in the spirit of the age, and faces us with the ahistorical moment that opens the timeless question about the ontology of evil. ( Ana Grobler, Eva Jus, Tamara Klavžar)
NENA
FILM ESSAY, 2021, 09:45
Zahida witnessed II WW and the Yugoslav war in the ’90s. The short film essay depicts her situation in a neglected region in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. The film relates directly to capitalism and the question of labor and capital structures of society. It shows how the political oligarchy devastated the country of its possessions.
SILENT OBSERVER
VIDEO, VOICEOVER, 2017, 07:55
LINK TO VIDEO
Camera: Vitya Gluschenko
Produced by KulturKontakt and Austrian Chancellery, AT.
The video performance acts as a monologue confession of a woman in her early thirties and the obstacles she is dealing with. Content deals with gender, identity, migration, and ethnicity. Autobiographical thoughts are exposed to the audience through the audio recording only, while the performer in the video is only partially visible. It gives a notion of a classical portrayal, with the mind being the primary source of happening. The artist is addressing the audience with the world’s issues – which are still current – while trying to escape her inner conflict. She is asking herself if she, as an individual, has done enough for society and if that is even possible given her confusion. Performance is not only personal; it is sharing common threads of the everyday world and appeals to the public to identify with the performer and vice versa.
ZAHIDA IS A FEMINIST
PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES 10x, PHOTO-PRINT ON COTTON CANVAS, 70×50, 2016
Sewed and print by Andrej Uduč and Matej Uduč
The red thread of the project is the question of feminism in the Balkans or how it is shaped through the occidental dominant white feminism. The issue I deal with is if we can talk about emancipatory women’s practices in the Balkans without the implications of the western category of ideological and cultural practices. If I simplify, I give voice to women who are historically completely neglected from this point of view and presented through a single prism, the prism of the patriarchy. Since the importance of their lives is pushed to the margins of anonymity and without value, I decided to do the opposite. The fact that the Balkans is described by the West and its intellectuals as patriarchal, traditional, rural, backward, mystical and scary is just one side of the story that has completely taken hold of our perception.
CROSSING BORDERS
VIDEO Performance, 04:53, 2015
Camera: Andrej Uduč
“The artist in the video performance stands in a blank space in front of the wall, to which, across the projection, the text in English is written: “I am a Muslim I am a Muslim I am a Muslim …”. The statement is repeated until it fills the entire wall. The artist stands still, has a loosely wrapped scarf around her head, and smokes a cigarette. After a while, she takes her scarf off her head and starts to say “I am a Muslim” out loud. She repeats the statement with various affirmative intonations. When the text is fully written, the artist leaves the scene. With the gesture of the projected text on her body, the artist publicly proclaims her origin, which can also be accepted as an identity in the local environment as a negative mark. By making confident statements, she accepts this identity, affirms it, and “crosses the border,” thereby achieving empowerment.” (Vesna Bukovec, DIVA – SCCA, 2019)