Proximities, rehearsals and archive (working title) - Katarina Zdjelar

Katarina Zdjelar’s work brings forward ideas around (female) solidarity, resistance, the importance of art in the face of political oppression, labour struggles and internationalism. Expanding from her ongoing work Not A Pillar Not A Pile (Tanz für Dore Hoyer) which premiered at Prix de Rome exhibition, her current research focuses more concretely on female friendship and solidarity and its methodological as well as aesthetically charged formalisations and material possibilities. 

Katarina is interested in a kaleidoscopic approach to female relationships as a state of moving one another in passion, purpose and politics. Her research includes historical elements into these themes and experiments as well as contemporary potentials. She creates a genealogy from different visual art practices and literature, inspired by authors such as Elena Ferrante, Clarice Lispector, Federica Bueti, Janice Raymond and Sarah Ahmed. These influences serve as a tool to unlock and define the potential of female friendship as a politically affective state of being and not only according to the intimacy of a personal relationship.

Shown at the NFA Research Weekend 2024, this research fed into Katarina’s film Gaze is a bridge, inspired by Nasta Rojc and her painting Self-Portrait with a Rifle (1912), as well as by the work and personal story of photographer and video artist Ana Opalić. Their biographies, determined by the right to choose freedom and love, taking place in two different periods almost a century apart, intertwine with each other.

The gaze in the film is a gaze of connecting autobiographies, of understanding, but also a gaze that challenges us to reach out and cross the bridge between the known and the unknown, between the present and the past, to build a bridge of connection between us and them, me and you. To recognise ourselves in our fragility, alienation, vulnerability, in the struggle for personal positions and places that belong to us all. She continues to exhibit the film in multiple display formats and draw new knowledge from it. 

Year

2021