The following description comes from the event organizer.

October 29, 2021 –January 2, 2022
Curated by Lucy Cotter

Working mainly in the medium of moving image and installation, Katarina Zdjelar’s work explores the way one body encounters another as a site of resistance and possibility. Voice, music, sound and language have been the core interests throughout her practice. This includes the use of language and how people reinvent their speech and bodies to assimilate in new conditions. This is visible in early works like “Shoum” (2013), which shows two Serbian men transcribing a pop song into “English”, creating their own language in the process. 

Zdjelar’s work often revolves around forms of rehearsal, an open-ended space in which things are  destabilized. In “AAA (Mein Herz)”, (2016), for example, a single-shot film shows a young woman simultaneously performing four compositions. While preserving the original style, tempo, and  rhythm of the individual works, she maintains the key of the different music pieces. The female  protagonist’s face and vocal chords serve as a battleground for the jerky transition between the different tracks, putting an emphasis on the multiple, fragmented yet simultaneous temporalities which run the economy of her voice and of the composition. Often in Zdjelar’s practice, it is the interruptions that speak, this time in the corporality of the performers voice. This mode of rehearsal and interruption returns in a further variation in her recent film, “Europe Where Have You Displaced  Love?” (2019) in which four musicians of different origins improvise on the interpretation of a text  by the poet Athena Farrokhzad. 

Zdjelar’s most recent works look at potentials and legacies of pacifist (proto) feminist practices, including that of Käthe Kollwitz and Dore Hoyer. At present, she is seeking to explore the fragile agency of collective action in the social and cultural conditions and urgencies of this moment. Her  current ongoing project, which departs from the multi-media video work “Not a Pillar not a Pile  (Tanz fur Dore Hoyer)” (2017) is inspired by archival documents from an all women’s dance studio  founded in 1945 in post-war Dresden by Dore Hoyer, a choreographer and expressionist dancer, whose choreographies took the graphic works of artist Käthe Kollwitz as their departure point. Zdjelar’s proposes this artistic meeting between Kollwitz and Hoyer as a manifestation of shared affnities with (proto) feminist pacifsm, solidarity and collective transformation across the barriers of  time, class and social difference. Drawing the past into the present, in the resulting film installation  one body encounters another as a site of resistance and possibility.