• 10/04/2024

Koštana Banović – Drawing Threads

Exhibition opening: Wednesday, April 10 at 7 p.m., Terra Gallery.

“Drawing threads” presents an overview of the multidisciplinary practice of the artist Koštana Banović, which includes a feature-length sensory ethnographic film, a multi-channel video installation; drawings made with pencil, wax and perforation technique; and objects that contain worlds in the constellation.

Ritual, sculpture in time. Repetitiveness, the possibility of sameness and difference, rhythm and pattern. Here, time is not only the present, but is transmitted as a trace from the past and a note for the future. In the space between transparency and opacity, dots and lines, protrusions and perforations, images appear. They talk about longing, about the desire that motivates us to reach into the unknown.

“Thread Drawing” aims for a liminal mind/body reorientation explored through a personal journey of artistic practice. With performative tools in the form of drawings and films, this journey is a set of multiple narratives presented in a non-linear form. Turning away from the problematic modes of ethnographic reportage, this artwork evokes intensified moments of everyday life and celebration of the everyday, depicting different communities in seven countries, their living spaces and beliefs, as a sensual tableau, adorned with apparent and hidden meanings. Demarcations do not allow themselves to be interpreted as borders and instead adopt a poetics according to which borders imply touching. Occupying time and regaining the autonomy of life through ritual, occupying space in the rejection of semiotic acceleration, dwelling in the pause of movement.

Koštana Banović is an artist and filmmaker from the Netherlands. She is active in various disciplines such as drawing, performance, video and film. Ritual is a recurring element in her work, as a choreography, a reflection of history and an action that activates objects, materials and aesthetics and erases boundaries. Her cinematic practice deals with the interaction of experimental and cinematic documentary styles and includes a reflexivity belonging to the film-essay genre. Her films have been awarded multiple times and shown at international film festivals, such as IFFR in Rotterdam and Jihlava IDFF in Jihlava. She exhibited at several international exhibitions, in cultural exchange residencies and conducted long-term artistic research in Senegal, Brazil and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Banović is currently the artistic director of the KAMEN Art Residency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the general director of the Eastern Neighbors Film Festival (ENFF) in The Hague in the Netherlands and co-curator of the Ellipsis, folds of memory, multidisciplinary art program between Sarajevo and Beirut.