”Take everything you can carry in your hands. Don't forget anything” / Past, present, future - it’s all about deconstruction,
@Walla Scen, Stockholm, Sweden, 2010
mixed media (photography, magazines, newpapersclips, a dramaplay/Aeschylos’s The Orestian trilogy, documentaries, diary-notes from subway, handcrafted wooden bird, souvenir-vase, vidoeloop of the the arstist as a nurse, videostills, familyalbum photographs, grey velvet curtain and a lock of hair from the artist)
The title ”Take everything you can carry in your hands. Don't forget anything” comes from a sentence my grandmother ones have said. Surviving the horrors of WWII, she and her five children had to take refuge in the mountains. when their home got attacked and burned down by the Nazi Germany Armed Forces and their allies.
In this installation I am trying to find a language for loss, trauma, and mourning. An investigation of the past, my own past, my parents past, and my grandparents past. Being the second and third generation of trauma victim, I am asking the question, what defines me today in relation to my parents life in the past, and to what extend has their decisions brought me to my choices in life and to my choice of becoming an artist? How can I tell the stories from the war and my grandparents without missing something of importance? In this work I have used a variety of images, texts and objects presented in a non-linear narratives mixed with from different disciplines, which together forms an intertwined web of relations and connections, banal as well as sophisticated. The images comes mostly from own photo-archive but also from magazines and other various media. The maze-like presentation of the work starts with a center of pain and grief (as I call it) and then develops into more space and gaps between the images and objects, filling the exhibition room with the kind of universe the work itself needs to be told in. My hope is to look for the truth in every decision making moment. The method that I have been using while choosing and installing this exhibition has been influenced by the writer Virginia Woolf and her way of writing in a ‘stream of consciousness’.
Epilouge and a quote
would like to add these words from the writer Maria Stepanova:
‘As I see it, all family stories and all true stories set in the 20th century are so full of loopholes, gaps, and voids that no story can be told in their completeness, it's almost certain that we don't have the whole story, but we know some parts. How should we deal with such a reality?’ from an interview with Maria Stepanova, writer, Swedish Televison, SVT/Babel, 2023-10-29
Following installation views and details of the exhibition at Walla Scen, Stockholm, Sweden, 2015. Including four solitary photographical works, which framed the exhibition: Ritual, The Unknown Photographer, Photograph from childhood memories, and Self Portrait 1993
installation overview
installation overview
detail
detail
installationsview (detail)
installationsview (detail)
installationsview (detail) The Grey Velvet Curtain, Ritual, The Ellis Island Series and The handcrafted wooden bird. 
It’s all about destruction, Pancevo, Serbia, 2011
The Unknown Photographer, New Years Eve, Yugoslavia 1962, (from my familyalbum) 2010, inkjet print, 79 x112 cm
Childhood memories, (from my familyalbum) inkjetprint, 80x125cm, 1964/2010
Untitled (from the Ellis Island series), NY, USA. 2010
(magazine clippings) detail from the installation
detail, still image from The Departure 2001 - An odyssey from ex-Yugoslavia to Sweden and back again, (dvd, loop, 10 min. 2001)
Self reflection and a photograph by Diane Arbus, titled Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark. NYC, 1965
(MoMA, december 2009)
Belgrade, Serbia, 2010
Me on the podium of The United Nations General Assembly Hall at the Headquarters in New York, USA 2010 Photo©Nargiza Turapova/UN Staff
New Jersey, NJ, USA, 2009
Croatia, 2007
Head of A Woman, The Metropolitan Musuem, NYC, USA, 2009