Nina Popovic’s sketches/paintings reflect an approach to art as an existential activity where at the end of one, for the author herself, excess declaration, the series of “States” is to be developed. This series does not function as a linear distribution, but rather as a set of “notes” created upon insisting on re-articulation of speech from a “place of excess”, i.e. the place that represents the fear of personal vulnerability through the painting manner. That is why every single canvas as a visual metaphor, being the integral part of the toughening process, loses its metaphoric properties, so the series of paintings becomes a set of straightforward first person claims: claims on fear, weakness, insecurity, …Although the art performance itself is an intimate dialogue, private testimony of a kind, it originates with the clear intention of the author that it should be exposed-i.e. presented in public what is private and usually not shown in the first person. Such exhibition becomes an act that is deliberately detached from the dominant production patterns, as well as local tendencies for “new media” and “modern” art practices, but not as a romantic cry for artistic autonomy but just the opposite: as the place from where artistic practices are to be referred to as functional parts of ideological patterns used to direct marginalization policies.

Text by Bojana Tamindzija