Katija Bogdanić / Adaptation: Between the Unknown and Home
Solo exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
The young Croatian-American artist Katija Bogdanić presents herself to the Zagreb audience with the exhibition "Adaptation: Between the Unknown and Home", which she is setting up as part of her graduation thesis of the same name at the Šira Gallery.
Katija was born in Zagreb, but spent most of her life in the United States. The decision to move, that is, to return to her hometown, was a kind of "trigger" for repressed emotions, questions and doubts about her own identity to come to the surface. Namely, this artist admits that she never fully felt American, because her parents raised her as a Croatian. At the same time, she never completely felt Croatian, because the environment in which she grew up was American. This "dual" existence, which prevented Katija from defining herself as a Croatian or an American and which did not allow her to associate her national identity with "here" or "there", the author calls being in "in-between". This inherently hybrid interspace is characteristic of emigrants and people who belong to two cultures at the same time – the paternal and the maternal one. The American-Indian literary theorist Homi K. Bhabha, speaking in the context of postcolonial critique, called such an "intermediate space" the "third space". The third space exists on the fragile foundations of uncertainty, but through the dissolution of the known, in its unrecognizability, it opens up to new meanings and representations. It is a space of cultural encounter and "negotiation" that results in hybridity, according to Bhabha. In the context of colonial critique, such an encounter produces a new paradigm that undermines the dominance of one culture over the other, thus deconstructing the binary oppositions created by both society and the human mind, which subconsciously registers them from the earliest childhood. By overcoming these binary oppositions, the "third space" at its core insists on the ultimate tolerance towards everything different. The space that Katija Bogdanić calls the space "between the unknown and home" does not speak of a real, physical space of "home" and "unknown", nor, as we might think from the name, of a journey from one to the other. Nor is it so much about settling in when returning to one's hometown, which will perhaps become home from the unknown. With her exhibition, Katija tells the story of a space that is not essentially the physical one. The third space of our artist is in the imagination and as such, it does not imply a fixed position. It has a fluid character, and we find it in the eternal act of searching. It is marked by ambivalent feelings of longing for belonging and retreating from them. These ambivalent feelings can also be read in the works of Katija Bogdanić exhibited at the Šira Gallery. By juxtaposing the motifs of the cave and the roof, the artist suggests that both of these symbols can have similar, but also completely different connotations. And while the cave, including the roof over our heads, represent some kind of shelter and a certain security, we build a house in order to stay somewhere, to put down "roots". The cave, on the other hand, will always be a somewhat wild part of nature, and as such symbolize that dark, unexplored space within ourselves to which, running away from it, we always return again. It is the space of Foucault's heterotopia – the world within the world, different from the one outside it, which he deforms by mirroring, creating its imaginary virtual image. The space between the unknown and home thus becomes a space of searching for ourselves. It is a journey through the personal subconscious and facing one's own fears, prejudices, longings or insecurities. Because only by dealing with them will we truly "find a home" built on the foundations of tolerance towards differences, a home that will always elude definition, determination or creation of molds, and thus undermine any attempt to create some new binary oppositions and inequalities.
Mirna Rul
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Katija Bogdanić was born in 1994 in Zagreb. She has lived in the USA since 1997. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland in 2019. She returned to Croatia to enroll in graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she graduated from the Department of Painting in 2021. She won the Special Jury Prize at a student exhibition at the Hoffman Gallery (Portland, Oregon). She lives and works in Croatia.
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
You can see the exhibition until 20.10.2022 during the working hours of the Šira Gallery (Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., 6-8 p.m., Saturdays: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.).
