Past Residents
Past Resident2010: Foundation for a Civil Society
Dušica Dražić
Dušica Dražić works with installation, performance and photography and carries a special interest in art in public space. Focusing on the search for abandoned, forgotten spaces in the urban structure of modern cities and exploring the transformation of these spaces, she rethinks them in terms of cultural continuity, symbolic irregularities and individual actions. In Dražić’s production, concept and form are of equal importance in opening the work to multi-layered interpretations, that is, for developing new ways of seeing. Dušica Dražić explores the ambivalent interrelationship between a citizen and a city, their mutual support and protectiveness and at the same time isolation and destruction. Dražić searches for spaces without order, spaces of irregularity, difference, flexibility and intuition. Dušica’s works deal with micro-histories of a locus and are also an act of narration.
Dušica Dražić was born in 1979 in Belgrade, Serbia, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from the faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 2004, and finished an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2006. Since 2006 Dušica Dražić is also a part of the collective “usually4” with K. Freino (PL), S. Hopkins (UK/KEN) and Teresa Luzio (P). In 2010 Dražić received the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award (Serbia) and the Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award (Italy) and was granted a DAAD scholarship in 2005/2006.
Events & Exhibitions
The Power to Host
June 15–July 29, 2011
Dušica Dražić, Dead-End Street, 2009, Installation, Dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by K. Freino.
Dušica Dražić, The Winter Garden, 2010, Installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by D. Dražic.
Dušica Dražić, Prelom - Breach, Break, Breakage, Failure, Fraction, Infraction, Rupture, Split, Layout, 2008, Installation, Dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist. photo by G. Micevski.
Dušica Dražić, One Home In Rydygiera 45a, 2006, Installation, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by D. Dražic.
Dušica Dražić, Young Serbians, 2006, Video performance. Courtesy of the artist.
Past Resident2010: CEC Artslink, Inc
Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva
Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva is a curator and art critic from Sofia, Bulgaria. Her research focus and curatorial practice are centered on the relations between the aesthetics of form and current social and political issues within the new generation of Bulgarian artists. Recently, she carried out a series of projects that dealt with the cultural features of the local context, among them The Temptation of Chalga (2009), curated in collaboration with Vessela Nozharova, and The Bold and The Beautiful (2010). In 2009, she was invited as a guest curator at the 15th Week of Contemporary Art in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, with Alter Ego, a project discussing the artists role in the global processes of political and supranational growing.
Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva (1977, Bulgaria) holds a Master Degree in Art History from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia. In 2010, she enrolled in a PhD program at the Institute for Art Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Since 2003, she has been the curator of the Cibank Gallery, where she has organized more than 80 exhibitions. Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva is a committed art critic and writes a column for Kultura, Bulgaria’s foremost culture and art weekly. She is also an independent consultant on contemporary art to several Bulgarian weekly and monthly pubications. In 2008, she co-founded the Art Affairs and Documents Foundation (A.A.D.F.), the sole association of young curators in Sofia.
Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva, The Temptation of Chalga, 2009, Installation view. Courtesy of the curator and Sofia City Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Vessela Nozharova.
Daniela Kostova, Body Without Organs, 2006, Installation view. Courtesy of the curator. Photo courtesy of Vessela Nozharova.
Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva, Alter Ego, 2009, Installation view. Courtesy of the curator and Center for Contemporary Art.
Nikoleta Marković, Alternative Economies, 2009. Courtesy of the curator.
Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva, The Bold And The Beautiful, 2010, Installation view. Courtesy of the curator and Raiko Aleksiey Gallery. Photo courtesy of Simeon Stoilov.
Past Resident2010: KUD Mreza Association for Arts and Culture, Alkatraz Gallery
Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak
‘The work of Nika Oblak and Primož Novak draws parallels between a society driven by personal needs and capital and their own role as artists in the contemporary art market. Infused with humor, their work adopts the visual tactics and seductive constructions commonly employed in the mass media to lure the consumer.’ (Yasmeen Baig-Clifford, Move – new European media art, 2009) Oblak & Novak have exhibited in the Sharjah Biennial 9, UAE; Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Japan Media Arts Festival; Transmediale Berlin, Germany; and most recently in Biennale Cuvee, Linz, Austria.
Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak. Courtesy of the artist.
