Take everything you can carry in your hands, don't forget anything. (Past, present, future it's all about destruction)
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 and the whole village got attacked and burned down by the Nazi German armed forces and their allies. That day, the 28th of July 1944 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 through my grandmothers’ words. I am interested in the question, what defines me in relation to my parents’ lives 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. In exile, the future does not exist. Only the chaos of displacement and fear. How can I reach out to the hope, love and compassion? As an artist, how can I and speak about the stories of survival, death, fear and of 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 want to liberate the form, from the content. Most of the material comes from my own archive but also from magazines and other media. The process of the maze-like presentation starts with a vantage point of pain, it expands and gets integrated in the exhibition room.
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