Isidora Krstić

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Artist statement

I was born in Serbia and brought up in South Africa. Growing up between two cultures and now living in a third, Austria, defines the core of my being as well as my artistic practice. My childhood in South Africa sparked the interest in topics such as the exotic, the question of what home is, the feeling of nostalgia felt for past things and the grief for the things that never were. As a result, in my work I often revisit the topic of colonialism and its consequences, through looking into, for example, colonial myths of the 16th century, or mining operations and exploitations in South Africa and South America. I see my artistic practice as a way to think, to understand processes and to question systems and structures in place in our society. The Swiss artist Miriam Cahn says that ‘females have a lot to do, they need to rewrite history’. A large part of my work is made through the starting point of living as a woman, the struggles of growing up as a woman and all that it entails and bears, the unspeakable and indescribable. As a woman making paintings, videos and sculptures today, I consider the very use of these media to be in itself a subversive practice given its historical context in which painters were usually men, painting women, for a specific (male) gaze. That being said, the use of the colour pink in a number of my works could easily be misinterpreted. With it, I want to challenge the interpretation of this colour as stereotypically sweet and girly by painting it,...

Artwork