Familiar Fantoms

Par­tic­i­pat­ing artists: Agri­na Vllasal­iu, Alma Gačanin & Glo­ri­ja Lizde. Curat­ed by Veroni­ka Mol­nár.
Live per­for­mance & read­ing on May 28, 3:00pm

Grow­ing up in the after­math of the Yugoslav Wars, Young Visu­al Artists Awards (YVAA) artists Agri­na Vllasal­iu, Alma Gačanin, and Glo­ri­ja Lizde explore how col­lec­tive, inter­gen­er­a­tional, and per­son­al mem­o­ries of war have shaped their iden­ti­ties and fam­i­ly his­to­ries. The exhi­bi­tion title ref­er­ences Slaven­ka Drakulic​’s essay, My Father’s Pis­tol (1991), in which a famil­iar phan­tom, a long-for­got­ten ghost of war, resur­faces when she first holds her father’s Beretta. In the works on view, all kinds of ghosts haunt the view­er: the land that keeps score of the bat­tles that scarred its sur­face, the home aban­doned before it could ever be inhab­it­ed, and the rain­coat car­ry­ing the weight of history.

Notions of belong­ing, migra­tion, and nation­hood are brought togeth­er in poet­ic med­i­ta­tions via pho­tog­ra­phy, video, instal­la­tion, and text. Pre­sent­ed in the Unit­ed States for the first time on Gov­er­nors Island, a for­mer mil­i­tary base, the site-spe­cif­ic iter­a­tions by Vllasilu, Gačanin, and Lizde cre­ate a dia­logue with the built envi­ron­ment where the specters of his­to­ry are ever present. With a war cur­rent­ly wag­ing in Europe, the fab­ric of anoth­er soci­ety is torn, and all-too-famil­iar ghosts of the past return to pose the same ques­tions again.

Res­i­den­cy Unlim­it­ed (RU) is one of the 2023 Gov­er­nors Island Arts Orga­ni­za­tions in Residence