Through her multidisciplinary work, Tatjana seeks to reconcile her relationship with the disparate places she calls home: Serbia, which she left as a young adult, and Canada, where she now lives. Her heterogeneous cultural identity affects her creativity, forging artistic connections between old and new references. She combines her native cultural memories, such as Serbian ethnic motifs and nostalgia for the naivety of Yugoslav utopia, with the contemporary concerns of Western Canada, with its complicated history and endangered future.
In my early days in Canada, I observed the ocean and the grand shapes of mountains, utterly foreign to my Serbian understanding of a landscape. Looking at this magnificent land through the viewfinder of my old visual references was a fascinating but disorienting experience, like looking at a mirage. I could not quite grasp what I saw, just as I could not grasp how to belong to this place. Even then, I sensed that what I saw was not all there was; there were complex issues and histories hidden behind the views.
My art evolved from working on a fragmented collection of seemingly unrelated projects to multi-disciplinary research with a focus on the unified concept based on the ideas evocative of a displaced life. Every part of my research directly influences other parts and provokes further research. I explore how cultural heterogeneity can be expressed through painting, drawing, collage, screen printing, fibre art, and storytelling. The main driving force is a search for a semiotic artistic language. Some examples of this symbolism in my artwork are expressive mark-making, fragmentation, patterning, and structural manipulation.
The Eternal Domicile (2022-2024) series of abstract paintings, titled after the evocative poetry verses by the Serbian poet Desanka Maksimovic, uses the metaphor of fragmentation to communicate the internal conflict stemming from the experience of displacement.
“One of the most challenging things contemporary art can do is produce a new language of emotion, a new way of understanding what we’re feeling now and how it is different from before.”
Greg Borowitz
Halcyon Days (2023) series hints at the importance of broadly sharing the visual languages of displacement at this time of global intertwining of cultures.
“The country we call home, the country we used to call home, and the country we dream to call home are all very distinct and disparate places. It is the result of a productive schizophrenia: we are in all of them at once, a ravishing sensation but one tempered by the slow, sobering devastation of never being in any one entirely.”
Slavs and Tatars Art Collective
Despite my cultural ambiguity, I am keenly aware of my positionality in Canada as an immigrant/settler. I empathically and respectfully navigate this land while seeking the language to state that even when one does not belong to any one place, one still belongs in the world. As I interweave the known with the unknown and imagined, be it Serbian, Canadian, or multicultural, my curiosity about the aesthetics of this visual process keeps growing. Displacement is and probably always has been a normal state of being for humanity. My artwork establishes a worldview where migratory experiences invoke observation, recollection, contemplation, and multicultural harmony.