Displaced Topologies
The Displaced Topologies collection explores belonging to disparate cultures through storytelling, ancestry, deep history, displacement, borders, and man-made structures. It gathers artworks that symbolize structures, documents, and humans connected by migration, displacement, and cultural heterogeneity. These works focus on the processes of fracture, disintegration, and rebuilding.
An abstract visual language is utilized to express a dichotomous cultural identity and to ponder the questions: As displaced people, how do we create a sense of home and build community in foreign places? What is the contribution of displaced people to the future?
Without defining myself as a Serbian artist in the Canadian diaspora or a Canadian artist with Serbian roots, I assert that art creation in this culturally ambiguous way is a generative space with tremendous potential to foster communication in a multicultural world.
Home Abroad (2023) and Morning Star (2024) are sewn canvas collages that evoke a relocated kind of life, where parts from different cultural worldviews come together to form something new. Minimalist compositions juxtaposed with the chaotic, galactic-looking patterns signify making order out of chaos, akin to making a home in the pandemonium of a displaced life.
Sediments of Time (2024-2025) is a group of canvas collage paintings hung in a bricolage pattern. The canvas surface is interrupted by tearing, fraying, and layering, evoking trauma but also breakthroughs and new perspectives. Three-dimensional forms, repetitive patterns, and alphabet-like symbols articulate dynamic gestures evocative of storytelling with narratives rooted in history.
The Four Buildings (2025) diptych references the roof shapes of specific buildings from my two homelands, suturing the distant cultures within a unified context. One pair of rooflines represents the travelling hubs that can facilitate and disrupt migration. The other pair represents universities, homes of enlightenment and activism. Each pair of buildings connects geographies and power structures of travel and education in Serbia and Canada on opposite sides of the globe, as well as world politics and positions of power.
Remnants of Time (2025) is a series of handwoven human-sized textiles. The warp/weft structures have been manipulated through tangling, unravelling, and pooling, referencing the soft structures experienced in intimate places and symbolizing the management of adverse situations within ourselves.
Haphazard Structures (2024-2025) are mixed-media drawings and embroidery on unframed raw canvas off-cuts. This body of work examines physical and bureaucratic structures related to migration using repurposed materials that reflect the scarcity mentality familiar to many migrants.