12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Marta Popivoda/Ana Vujanović live and work in Berlin, DE, and Belgrade, RS

Film director Marta Popivoda and dramaturge Ana Vujanović have collaborated on films as well as stage and dance performances. The common thread that traverses these productions is the tension between memory, history, and ideology, acknowledged from a radical feminist perspective, specifically in relation to Yugoslav history and notions of the Anthropocene. In their works Landscapes of Resistance (2021), Bodyscapes #1: Woman in Battle (2019), and Freedom Landscapes (2018), the artists use landscape dramaturgy that combines feminist (her)storytelling and sites of antifascist memory to produce what they describe as “verbal images,” inspired by Cubism and Constructivism’s rejection of the single-point perspective.

A collaboration with choreographers and dancers Hana Erdman and Louise Dahl, Moss Does It Better (an eco-feminist meditation) (2022) is a two-channel video installation filmed at the Orlången Nature Reserve in Sweden. The work stages Erdman and Dahl among the reserve’s nonhuman actors, in a setting where human bodies do not take center stage, but are on par with moss, stones, trees, and sunlight. Taking prompts from the natural attributes of moss—a rootless rhizoidal unicellular flora that embraces the element propitious for its development—the artists present and narrate the realm of the reserve as a complex web of interconnected living and breathing cognitive beings. The radical slowing down of movement and time embodies the refusal to comply with an anthropocentric perception of time, instead re-attuning human bodies to the experience of time according to the forest’s other protagonists. The installation is also an invitation to broaden perception—to discover details and ponder the multiple modes of being in the world, while its critical deceleration incarnates the anticapitalist principle of economic degrowth.

Rasha Salti

Exhibitions

Bigger than Myself: Heroic Voices from ex-Yugoslavia, 2021, MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (IT)

Otvorit ću vrata ravno, ravno u vatru, 2019, Gallerija Nova, Zagreb (HR)

I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire, 2019, State of Concept Athens, Athens (GR)

District, Berlin School Without Center *Moscow, 2018, MMOMA – Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (RS)