Vesna Perunović: Home Paradigm

The exhibition by Vesna Perunović’s showcases her works made over the past fifteen years, when she has used various artistic means and processes to address questions of home and belonging, as well as to explore ways in which one’s own identity is being established and represented. The artist translates her visions of home and belonging into a complex visual language, using various, media, techniques and processes such as drawing and painting, found and reused objects, performance, video and photography.

The exhibition entitled Home Paradigm presents a specific selection of works that above all address the artist’s intimate perspective of displacement. Perunović moved to Canada in the late 1980s to escape the socio-political disintegration of Yugoslavia, as obvious ideological, national and cultural divisions in society began to emerge. In this process, she got familiar with the position of being an immigrant in a new and different cultural milieu on a very personal level, which is one of the reasons why she in her artistic practice so often explores the experience of belonging, acceptance and a sense of familiarity and otherness. Her work also highlights a number of universal and topical socio-political phenomena that, willingly or unwillingly, influence one’s life. Her works therefore expose the accumulated disparities, contradictions and absurdities of a global society in the period of instability and turmoil at the beginning of the 21st century. In this segment, in particular, she highlights and critically dissects the deeply discriminatory perception of various immigrant groups, which constitutes one of the most obvious forms of class struggle and shows signs of growing colonialism, nationalism and racism. Moreover, the artist profoundly reflects on the notions of home as an intimate shelter, and addresses the pervasive processes of gentrification and elitisation of (above all) urban centres, where most of the people are unable to afford their own homes. In the new social circumstances, home is no longer a basic human right, but a privilege.

The exhibition is a result of collaboration with the MSUB – Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.