Tanja Softic
My work addresses factors of cultural hybridity that shape the identity and world view of an immigrant: exile, longing, translation, and memory. As an immigrant to the United States from Bosnia, once part of Yugoslavia, I am fascinated by questions of cultural identity or cultural belonging on an intellectual level but I experience and feel what Edward Said called “the contrapuntal reality [of an exile]” very acutely: I have transitioned through three citizenships in addition to one period of being a citizen of no country. In both my new and old countries, outdated notions of national and ethnic identity and belonging continue to shape the politics and the society.
The visual vocabulary of my drawings and prints suggests a displaced existence: fragmented memories, adaptation, revival, and transformation. Because I do not live and work within the comfort or boundaries of the culture in which I first learned to observe, interpret and engage the world, I have the arguable privilege of having lived more than one life. My memory is my virtual self and, paradoxically, my most authentic self. Yet, memory is a process that involves erosions and accretions that occur with any reconstructive, interpretative or artistic act. One re-connects that which has been broken, fragmented or overlaid. Re-membering becomes an act of reconstruction, where one works with what is there and tries to visualize what has been lost. Because each act of memorization necessarily involves interpretation, there can be no objective recollection. Nor is there full erasure; like matter, memory seems to persist by transforming.
I make prints because the process itself mirrors the complexity of visual storytelling. Prints speak in a different voice than paintings or even drawings. In making a color print, the process demands that the image be deconstructed, envisioned as a series of layers, taken apart in order to be put together again. It also encourages the viewer to look closer, to have a similar aggregate experience of myriad details building up into an image.
