Traces of Home
In her cycle of large scale works entitled „Traces of Home“ , Irma Markulin takes an analytical point of view regarding the history of her home country Bosnia and Herzegovina. For this, she implements photographic material both from archives and personal family photo albums. The chosen material is dedicatedly documentary and focusses on memories of childhood and home.
Through this use of archive and personal documents, the artist creates a space of her own memories, intimately entangled with specific historical events. For instance, one of the works combines the portrait of a Turkish woman living in Bosnia during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (ca. 1900, derived from an old postcard) with photographs taken during the civil war in 1993, making the used material evolve into a public archive of identity and home
The used photo material templates are printed in extreme augmentation. Because of this, the perceivable surface of the photographs distort into their pixel-structure. Afterwards some of these pixels are cut out by the artist, giving the works their unique transparence and empowering them to be viewed at from both sides.
The motives of destruction used in the works (for instance the famous bridge of Mostar) translate symbolically into the pixel-destruction of the cutting process. The time consuming process of cutting is also in itself a timely and physical altercation of the artist with the politically burdened motives and experiences of her home country and her personal family history. The empty spaces created by the cutting process are evocative of traditional crochet works from Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is made in handicraft up to today. In this regard both, destruction and creation, are part of the cutting process and the works.
Translation Philipp Koch
working process, digital photo print 2012, studio at Petersburger Platz
working process, paper cutt - negativ 2012, studio at Petersburger Platz