Opening: Thursday, January 16, at 7 p.m
With the exhibition Foreign Skins, Ivana Ranisavljević presents fragments of the works she produced in the period of the previous four years, most of them created during her doctoral studies at the New Media Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. It is a unique ambient installation woven from photographic and video materials of bodily gestures and actions primarily reduced to auto-violent acts and endurance.
Through her own actions that are some kind of shock tactic, the artist confronts the viewer with what, unfortunately, greatly colors contemporary Serbian society, and that is violence against women as a consequence of deep-rooted misogyny, i.e. systemic gender discrimination. It is about a strategy of transgression, i.e. rebellion against the patriarchal order, which aims to take a critical look at the socially constructed role of women.
Ivana Ranisavljević is a visual and performance artist from Serbia. She graduated from the painting department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, where she also received her doctorate from the Department of New Media, under the mentorship of Dr. Zoran Todorović.
The focus of her artistic practice in the last couple of years is primarily the female body as a symbol of strictly defined social codes. Using the vocabulary characteristic of the body art of the 60s and 70s of the last century, which includes auto-violent actions and interventions on the body, Ivana Ranisavljević reminds that the female experience in the local context is still shaped by patriarchal myths.