The Displaced Topologies collection, created as the practice-based MFA thesis studio work, comprises four distinct bodies of work that explore the concept of belonging to disparate cultures. The project examines ancestry, deep history, displacement, borders, hard and soft man-made structures, records of fractures, falling apart and rebuilding.
(installation photos by Rachel Topham)
Artist Statement
I grew up doodling on my father’s mechanical engineering textbooks, and sewing clothes using patterns from my mother’s fashion magazines. As an artist, I favour compositions where the whole consists of tailored parts, forming a structure akin to a blueprint, reflecting my need to make things work and create order out of chaos. My worldview lends to structural symbols reminiscent of maps, archives, borders, and walls. Walls often come up in my narratives. I remember the walls torn down, the walls I have repaired, and the walls of monuments crumbling under the sediments of history. I remember the belief in building a new world for a better future. Much happens in the world while the walls go up and down haphazardly, with their unanticipated agency.
In Morning Star (2024) and Home Abroad (2023), the sewn canvas collage approach evokes a relocated kind of life where the parts may originate from different cultural worldviews, forming something new. Minimalist compositions are juxtaposed with the chaotic, galactic-looking patterns, which signify making order out of chaos, akin to making a home in the pandemonium of a displaced life. The gray pockmarked, splattered textures relate to spatial and temporal topologies, the earth’s agency, broken-up grids, blasts and spillages, slow sedimentations, and the aftermaths of cataclysms. On the human scale, this texture evokes man-made concrete structures and the surface of rocks formed by the forces of nature. The circular forms, vessel-like shapes, and watery patterns, perhaps symbolize journeys toward a new homeland.
Sediments of Time (2024-2025) is a group of canvas collage paintings on stretched canvases hung in a bricolage pattern. The wall of paintings is a metaphor for walls as transient structures encrusted with history. It represents the complex wall we carry within ourselves, formed by history, cultural identity, and hopes for the future.
The Four Buildings (2025) diptych references the roof shapes of four specific utilitarian buildings from my two homelands, suturing the distant cultures within a unified context. One pair of rooflines represents the travelling hubs I have frequented, both having the power to facilitate and disrupt migrations. The other pair represents the universities I have attended in the two countries, homes of enlightenment, disillusion, and activism. Each pair of buildings connects geographies and power structures of travel and education in Serbia and Canada in an upside-down way, as one may think of them being on opposite sides of the globe, world politics, and positions of power. Aesthetically, this work is influenced by the topological photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher. While our medium differs, the Bechers’ and my work's subject matter is the once imposing buildings becoming derelict spaces over time, examined as flattened, blueprint-like compositions characterized by their pareidolic shapes that hint at the agency of those innate objects
Haphazard Structures (2024-2025) are mixed media drawings on unframed raw canvas off-cuts displayed in a vitrine as documents of a cultural history interpreted in art. This body of work examines the complexities of processing heterogeneous cultural identity by exploring the physical structures, such as buildings, and conceptual ones, such as bureaucratic structures, related to migrations. I am particularly interested in how these constructs carry marks of disruptive events, slow decay, and sediments deposited over time. Specifically, I search for aspects of haphazardness as a marker of impermanency that symbolizes the never-ending chain of destruction and rebuilding of a displaced life. While the use of frayed canvas remnants and the gesture of previously sewn and torn-off elements relate to the displacement events, the line drawings and embroidery serve as a slow, reverent observation of the never-ending cycle of making and remaking. This work historicizes lived experience and lends texture and encrustation of history to the original documents that inspired the work. The materials reflect my need for frugality and repurposing, and the scarcity mentality familiar to most migrants. The pieces of canvas are placed on acid-free glassine paper, which I use to pack and store away the keepsakes inherited from my family.
Remnants of Time (2025) is a series of woven human-sized pieces placed on individual plinths, representing displaced humans standing together, claiming their space in the world and history. The human-sized plinths reference Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages, where the artist reimagined the length of one meter. Remnants of Time reimagine the space required by a human being. The banner-like woven pieces with warp/weft structures manipulated by tangling, unravelling, and pooling, refer to the soft structures experienced in intimate places and symbolize the management of adverse situations within ourselves. Each piece features a representation of a topography, including my torn-apart former homeland, the dry-blood-coloured land of my mother’s family, the map of my birth city on the river Danube, and the blueprints of my Serbian and Canadian homes juxtaposed as a storytelling foil. Although these woven pieces are reminiscent of political banners, scrolls, and proclamations, they embody humanity through their scale, the pooling of blood-like threads, the way they accompany each other, and how they attempt to repair themselves. They anchor how one places oneself in history while showing the turmoil, shifting, and uprooting. We are all remnants of times in how we carry our locations, geologies, histories, blood and genes as our lives unfold.
I am often asked about my life in Yugoslavia, if I am a Serb or Croat, if I condone war, if my family is well. A Canadian colleague told me about his memory of travelling to Eastern Europe, recalling it as a place full of sad, gray people. I remember my childhood as joyful and full of wonder, although the colours of my childhood home, the buildings, the clothes, and even my toys were subdued compared to what I see now in Canada. The people behaved differently in public, enacting a performative discipline that would translate as excessive sternness or sadness to an outsider. But there was the red of the communist banners, the women’s day carnations, pioneer bandanas, and roses for birthdays and anniversaries. Red was the favourite colour of my beautiful, gray people.