Claudia Zini is an Italian art historian and curator focusing her professional interests on visual arts dealing with the aftermath of war and violence. She holds a PhD degree from the Institute of Art in London. In 2019 she was one of the curators of the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina representing the German-Bosnian artist Danica Dakic at the Venice Biennale.
"Velma Babić’s most representative works produced from 2012 until 2022 are exploring four main topics: identity, home vs migration as well as trauma and the female body.
The photographer is originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country where there remains a good deal of tension between individual and collective memories as people still lack control over their historical narrative. She belongs to the lost generation from the 1970s in former Yugoslavia who was sacrificed during the war, the victim of tragic events: her youth and future perspective were brutally interrupted for long, while others lost their lives. The experience of the war informs her photographic practice that explore her fragmented identity through the genre of self-portrait in the context of war, migration, forced displacement and ultimately, the vulnerable human condition.
In her body of work, highly influenced by the relationship between photography, literature and performance, she uses different props and techniques such as masks, mirrors, collages and specific camera settings to highlight a feeling of alienation which refers to the alienating experience of being detached from one’s homeland and the simultaneous experience of being a migrant. Looking at the generation of female artists since the 1970s, she was inspired to use the physical body as a medium, as living sculpture or canvas, resulting in direct confrontation between the artist and the audience.
Her photographs often have an oniric nuance, where trauma and memory suppression are lingering. There is also ambiguity, vagueness, the depiction of a surrealist world where the artist’s identity often disappears to invite the viewer to project their own self. In her photographs, she is author and subject at the same time. As she affirms, “involving the own subject into a medium is providing a distance from the individual experience of its creator. My body on the picture could be considered as an avatar with the task to visualise hidden structures beyond my own gaze and beyond the gaze of society”. Allowing the artist to deconstruct her identity, reconstruct her memories and rediscover her own voice.
On stage, she appears in control of the narrative, challenging the female identity, perpetually subjected to the male gaze, and emerging from a position of victimhood to one where she tries to regain agency over her life.
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but a theatre in which the past takes place”, points out Walter Benjamin. The artist’s photographs become a theatre stage, a safe space for a cathartic process for the purification and purging of emotions that results in renewal and restoration, both for the author and the viewer. At the same time, the performative act of memory in her work testifies to the exhausting inability to evoke anything more than a trace of the subject depicted."
Dr. Claudia Zini