Participating artists: Agrina Vllasaliu, Alma Gačanin & Glorija Lizde. Curated by Veronika Molnár.
Opening: Saturday May 13, 2023 | 12:00–6:00pm
Live performance & reading on May 28, 3:00pm
Open to the public Fri-Sun 11am-5pm, or contact us for a viewing appointment at info@residencyunlimeted.org
KODA/RU House, #404B Colonels Row | Click here for access to Governors Island
Click here to view this exhibition on Governors Island’s website
Click here to view the online brochure
Growing up in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, Young Visual Artists Awards (YVAA) artists Agrina Vllasaliu, Alma Gačanin, and Glorija Lizde explore how collective, intergenerational, and personal memories of war have shaped their identities and family histories. The exhibition title references Slavenka Drakulic’s essay, My Father’s Pistol (1991), in which a familiar phantom, a long-forgotten ghost of war, resurfaces when she first holds her father’s Beretta. In the works on view, all kinds of ghosts haunt the viewer: the land that keeps score of the battles that scarred its surface, the home abandoned before it could ever be inhabited, and the raincoat carrying the weight of history.
Notions of belonging, migration, and nationhood are brought together in poetic meditations via photography, video, installation, and text. Presented in the United States for the first time on Governors Island, a former military base, the site-specific iterations by Vllasilu, Gačanin, and Lizde create a dialogue with the built environment where the specters of history are ever present. With a war currently waging in Europe, the fabric of another society is torn, and all-too-familiar ghosts of the past return to pose the same questions again.
Click below to see images from the exhibition
About
Agrina Vllasaliu (b. 1990, Pristina) combines various materials and media such as painting, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Her current approaches to art go hand in hand with her studies in the field of geography at Humboldt University (Berlin). Agrina’s interests focus on migration, individual and collective conceptions of identities, and the transmission of cultural practices and narratives from a feminist perspective. As a bilingual child of parents that migrated from Kosovo, she explores the boundaries between home and homeland, identities and cultures.
Alma Gačanin (b. 1988, Sarajevo) is the winner of the 2022 ZVONO Art Award for Young Visual Artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Alma Gačanin is an artist, poet, and feminist whose practice is based on researching the specifics of labor and the precariousness of certain professions for which she attended professional training. She is particularly interested in value theory, biopolitics, and social reproduction. Alma Gacanin explores the link between artistic practice and earning a living through drawing and performance.
Glorija Lizde (b.1991., Croatia) is an artist working with staged photography. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Film and Video from the Academy of Arts Split and her Master’s in Photography from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Croatia. Her work has been shown in both group and solo exhibitions. Lizde’s works are part of private and public collections. She is the recipient of the Radoslav Putar Award 2022 for the best young contemporary artist in Croatia as well as the recipient of Dr. Éva Kahán Foundation artist in residency program 2022.
Veronika Molnár (b. 1996, Budapest) is a curator and writer currently based in Budapest. She has been the Artistic Director of Liget Gallery, one of Budapest’s longest-standing nonprofit galleries, since November 2022. Molnar received her MA in Art History from Hunter College, the City University of New York, in 2021 with the support of the Fulbright grant. Her research interests lie at the intersection of artistic activism and environmental justice; her curatorial and writing practice currently focuses on artists and collectives who have been engaging with the topic of the planetary climate crisis.
This program benefits from the support of The Trust for Mutual Understanding. We are also grateful to BuBu Residency.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
