Neli Ružić

Author's statement about her work:

In my work, I explore personal and collective memory and forgetting in relation to transitional identities. I use various media such as photography, objects, installations, and video installations, and I often engage in process-based works over extended periods. Some of my works are conceived as time machines, and the problem of time, heterochrony, and memory runs through my entire body of work.
The experience of migration is reflected in the works in several ways: from absence to repetition, traces and palimpsests to transformations. Social and emotional aspects overlap. Utopias of the past and personal micro-utopias, history and landscape.

In the Strategy of Forgetting project (2005/06), material traces created by erasure (like erasers or correction fluid) taken directly from the practice of negation and radically different markings of history, form new landscapes. The Cartography of Time and Necessary Utopias (2007) evokes an ideal non-place, a utopian in-between space that is characteristic of my artistic and life position.

I am interested in the intimate layers of history and the constant presence of the past in the present. In the video installation Jama (2011, in collaboration with Marie-Christine Camus), I explore the relationship between the politics of forgetting and memory in relation to a site of collective trauma.

The two-channel video installation Songs for the Future (2013) is a kind of archaeology of intergenerational memory and temporality through the relationship between ideology, the emotionality of music, and landscape.