Displaced Topologies
The Displaced Topologies collection explores the concept of belonging to disparate cultures within the context of storytelling, ancestry, deep history, displacement, borders, and both hard and soft man-made structures, as well as records of fractures, disintegration, and rebuilding. It gathers artworks that symbolize structures, documents, and humans connected by the conditions of migration, displacement, and cultural heterogeneity.
In this series of works, I use an abstract visual language to express a dichotomous cultural identity and to ponder the question: 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?
Displaced Topologies defies the limitation of any one cultural gaze. I don’t consider myself a Serbian artist in the Canadian diaspora or a Canadian artist with Serbian roots. Creating art in this culturally ambiguous way is my assertion that the in-between state of the displaced is neither temporary nor a place of inadequacy. It is a generative space with tremendous potential for fostering communication in the multicultural future.
Home Abroad (2023) and Morning Star (2024) are experimental artworks that paved the path for Displaced Topologies. The sewn canvas collages 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.
Sediments of Time (2024-2025) is a group of canvas collage paintings on stretched canvases hung in a bricolage pattern. The surface of the canvas is interrupted by tearing, fraying, and layering, evoking trauma but also breakthroughs and new perspectives. Three-dimensional forms of folded textiles are flattened into patterns through line drawing, repetition, collaging, and removing the shapes, which are positioned into a lineup of alphabet-like symbols that articulate dynamic gestures evocative of pictorial writing.
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.
Remnants of Time (2025) is a series of woven human-sized banner-like artworks. The 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.
Haphazard Structures (2024-2025) are mixed media drawings and embroidery on unframed raw canvas off-cuts. This body of work examines physical structures, such as buildings, and conceptual ones, such as bureaucratic structures, related to migrations. The materials reflect my need for frugality and repurposing, and the scarcity mentality familiar to many migrants. I used the thread from a big bag of embroidery floss remnants I inherited from my mother, connecting the fragile family structure to the artwork.