Ana Čvorović: Borders Unfold

Borders Unfold presents the latest expression of Ana Cvorovic's ongoing enquiry migration and displacement. As part of her Arts Council-funded project with the same title, Borders Unfold is the culmination of a year-long exploration of the complex psychological effects of geographic dislocation, particularly within communities from former Yugoslavia displaced during the civil war of the nineties.

Aiming to create a link between her own experience of displacement and that of others, the artist pursued a research residency in Utica, New York, the city with the largest rate of refugees per capita in the US, in the summer of 2018. Having worked with the local community on interviews, workshops and sound recordings, now she returns to sculpture to unfold her own interpretation of this investigation.

The exhibition will feature a new body of work comprised of sculptural works, site- specific installations and a surround soundscape, inviting visitors to experience the gallery space as an immersive journey. Elements such as cast objects, oil paintings on tarpaulin, and everyday items incapsulated in resin, present some of Cvorovic's recurring motifs, as well as new sculptural processes initiated specifically for this project. As with previous works, the vulnerability of childhood is evoked in visceral, sensorial ways.

Whilst in Discharged (2014) we saw child mattresses protruded by a metal frame, Borders Unfold introduces a series of aquatic references, like child swimming suits and colorful fishing paraphernalia, highlighting water as a host for varied psychological states. Often with a sense of trauma, the visitor is faced with contrasting hints to flow and stagnation, mobility and immobility, as if trying to bring back a time in life that was interrupted.

Exploring the intersections between sculpture and sound for the second time, after her site-specific work Closeness (2016) at Koppel Project, Cvorovic brings to Pi Artworks London manipulated sound recordings from her time in Utica, further infusing this multi-layered intervention with a sense of fragmented memory and landscape.

With this work Ana Cvorovic brings forward, through her diverse approaches to sculpture, both personal and collective perspectives of psychogeography and contemporary migrant identity. This presentation has the ambition to engage the audience in new critical, sensorial, and formal ways towards this timely theme.

Ana Cvorovic: b. 1981, Sarajevo, lives and works in London. Ana Cvorovic moved to the UK with her family in 1989, fleeing the impending civil war in former Yugoslavia. A student at Chelsea College of Art, Brighton University and the Royal College of Art, Čvorović's installation-based work considers the role of borders and boundaries and the psychological effects of war and migration.

In 2017 Cvorovic was shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and in 2018 she became the recipient of the a-n Artist Bursary Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally and across the UK including Pi Artworks, Collyer Bristow, Backlit Gallery, Maddox Arts, Ben Uri and The Koppel Project, as well as specially curated sections of Art15 and Ch.ACO art fair, selected by Kathleen Soriano and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. In 2018 she participated in the 'Who Are We' project in association with Counterpoints Arts at Tate Exchange.

"My installations are an exploration of the psychodynamics of place, specifically in the context of war, migration, socio-economic impoverishment and processes of globalisation. Investigations into psychological and physical shifts as we move from place to place question notions of belonging, structure, identity and freedom. My personal experiences of displacement during the onset of the Yugoslav civil war (1992-1995) continue to inform my practice and its concern with the current rapid formation of global diaspora.

The continuity between our internal and external realities that so powerfully ruptures during the process of forced displacement creates fragmentary experiences and a crisis in identity. This liminal state is what the work often depicts, inviting the viewer to drift between its paradoxical zones of seduction and danger, comfort and confinement, movement and immobility. Taking both personal and historical events as a point of departure, the work repurposes domestic everyday items imbued with notions of childhood, memory and the unconscious.

Shifting from intimate areas of tight pictorial detail to immersive spatial interventions, my practice seeks to convey the conflicting experience of our vulnerable human condition."

Ana Cvorovic