Nathalie Basoski

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

As a Dutch-Macedonian photographer and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY, foreignness is a cornerstone of my identity. Navigating my status as an immigrant, as queer, as a polyglot, I know familiarity to be fleeting and memory to be fragmentary, and my art similarly elides easy categorization. Through photography, video, and mixed media, I visually examine the insufficiency of recollection, creating works that feel like a hazy childhood memory. I contemplate the condition of displacement and the struggle for assimilation through retrospective visual narratives in which I combine used materials like linen, curtains, and clothing with photographs printed on textiles that portray intimate landscapes, domestic settings, and the aftermath of inhabitation. Honoring the traditions of predominantly female quilt-makers, whose art for so long was seen as purely utilitarian, I transform images of the mundane into works that are both fantastical and inescapably human. By tightly cropping these images, I remove the wholeness of these photographs and video stills and reconfigure them to evoke the feelings of selective recollection.

Artwork