Katarina Zdjelar: Proximities, a rehearsal, an archive

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Kenton
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When
Oct. 29, 2021–Jan. 2, 2022
Friday through Sunday, Noon–5 p.m.
Free
Where
8371 N Interstate Ave
Portland, OR 97217

The following description was submitted by the event organizer.

Curated by Lucy Cotter

Working mainly in the medium of moving image and installation, Katarina Zdjelar’s work explores the way one body encounters another as a site of resistance and possibility. Voice, music, sound and language have been the core interests throughout her practice. This includes the use of language and how people reinvent their speech and bodies to assimilate in new conditions. This is visible in early works like “Shoum” (2013), which shows two Serbian men transcribing a pop song into “English”, creating their own language in the process. 

Zdjelar’s most recent works look at the potentials and legacies of pacifist (proto) feminist practices, including that of Käthe Kollwitz and Dore Hoyer. At present, she is seeking to explore the fragile agency of collective action in the social and cultural conditions and urgencies of this moment. Her current ongoing project, which departs from the multi-media video work “Not a Pillar not a Pile  (Tanz fur Dore Hoyer)” (2017) is inspired by archival documents from an all women’s dance studio founded in 1945 in post-war Dresden by Dore Hoyer, a choreographer and expressionist dancer, whose choreographies took the graphic works of artist Käthe Kollwitz as their departure point. Zdjelar’s proposes this artistic meeting between Kollwitz and Hoyer as a manifestation of shared affinities with (proto) feminist pacifism, solidarity and collective transformation across the barriers of time, class and social difference. Drawing the past into the present, in the resulting film installation, one body encounters another as a site of resistance and possibility.