Take everything you can carry in your hands, don't forget anything.
(Past present future it's all about destruction and the story of my grandmothers’ escape from death)
Walla Scen, Stockholm, Sweden, 2010
Mixed media, photography, ready-made objects and texts, and a video loop
“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 or 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? - Maria Stepanova, writer.
The title, Take everything you can carry in your hands, don't forget anything. comes from a sentence my grandmother once said surviving the horrors of WWII. She and her four children had to take refuge in the mountains and hide there for several days when their home got attacked and burned down by the Nazi German armed forces and their allies. That day, the 29th of July 1943 also known as the massacre of village Velika in Crna Gora/Montenegro, once a former republic of Yugoslavia can also be described as a generational trauma of war. In this installation I'm trying to find the language for loss, trauma and mourning. I am interested in the question, what defines me today in relation to my parents’ life’s in the past and to what extent has the decisions brought me to my choices in life and to my choice of becoming an artist? Everything is connected and relates to what is coming next. I am trying to connect history to present time. The future (I hope) is present in the gaze of the viewer.
How can I tell the stories about not giving up, about survival, fear from death and ways of conquering fear and division with love? The history of my parent’s and grandparent’s life without missing something important? I have in this work used variety of images texts and objects and presented them in a nonlinear narrative, mixed with various disciplines which together forms an intertwined web of relations and connections. I am interested in addressing the banal as well as sophisticated. Most of the material comes from my own archive’s but also from magazines and other media. The maze-like presentation of the work starts with the vantage point of pain (or a black hole) it and then develops into more space and gaps between the images and objects, the installation then expands in the exhibition room. A kind of universe of trauma and hope.
Caption: the following images are overall views and details of the exhibition, including four solitary photographical works, framing the installation.
The Ritual, 1975/2010, (c-print mounted in glass) The Unknown Photographer, 1962/2010, inkjet print, The crying child and the boy, and Self-portrait,1993 (from the series Self-portrait 1991-94)
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, Yugoslavia 1962, (from my familyalbum) 2010, inkjet print, 79 x112 cm
The crying child and the boy, inkjetprint, 80x125cm, 1964/2010
Untitled (from the Ellis Island series), NY, USA. 2010
detail from the installation, (magazine clippings) 
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 Selfportrait 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