Departing from our own personal geographies, with all their layers and trajectories, this video-based exhibition forms part of a long-term project that aims to intensify social and historical sensibility and to create transversal links from south and east of Europe to South America and vice versa. Through fragmented micro-histories and ancestry-related issues of memory and forgetting, the artists are searching for the ways to confront traces of the past inscribed in landscapes, minds and bodies. Their critical reflections on micro- and macro-politics from antiracist (post-)migrant  feminist and queer perspectives put into question established historiographical categories, the linearity of historical processes and the meaning of political identities and territories. We wish to touch upon the materiality of memory and media that brings about the promise of transmitting an openness to what is absent, to what no longer takes place, taking into account what has been lost in the process of remembering and gained in the process of imagining new forms of subjectivity.

[personal]—geographies is a long-term project that includes research, exhibitions, film programs and publication. Born out of friendship, it was initiated in 2016 by Branka Vujanović and Yara Haskiel.

Branka Vujanović is an art historian, researcher and curator. She participated in a series of regional and international projects dedicated to the contested issues of memory and subjectivity in contemporary art practices.

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Vujanović holds a PhD in Cultural and Social Sciences from the Justus Liebig Universität Giessen, master degree in Art History from Belgrade University and specific master degree in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She participated in the Program of Independent Studies at Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona (MACBA) and the Graduate Centre for the Studies of Culture (GCSC), JLU Giessen. Recent research projects: Figures of Resistance and Artistic Practices in Cold War’s Outer Zones: Spain and Yugoslavia (UAB), Cultural Frameworks and Politicization of Art and Memory in Spain and Yugoslavia (UAB), Aesthetics of Transgression and its Strategies in Post-Yugoslav Art (JLU Giessen). She presented her research in a series of university conferences and seminars in Barcelona, Ithaca New York, Giessen, Zurich, Belgrade and Sarajevo. She was working at the Art Centre Collegium artisticum Sarajevo and at RocioSantaCruz gallery in Barcelona.

Lives and works in Barcelona and Sarajevo.

Yara Haskiel is a video artist, researcher and activist who experiments with found footage, new media and performative formats through video essays and multi-screen installations.

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Haskiel studied Experimental Film and Art and Media at the University of Arts in Berlin and Hamburg. She was part of the Program of Independent Studies at Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona (MACBA). Haskiel holds a specific master degree in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The connections between memory and (dis-) placement of minor and forgotten narratives and their social effects are central themes in her works: Memory Extended (2011) and Tsakalos Blues (2014). Further she deals with practices of mourning through storytelling and the effects of precarity in relation to love from a feminist perspective: It’s late, a mourning spell (2017), I don’t write diaries I, II: On Love and Crisis and the Power of Fragility (2016). She presented her works at international film festivals and exhibitions, including the gallery Àngels in Barcelona (2015), Dimitria Festival in Thessaloniki (2015) and Athens Biennale (2016). In the past she held lectures and screenings at the University of Thessaly, Alice Salomon University Berlin, University of Perugia, the University of Vienna and at the Centro de Fotografía y Medios Documentales (CFD) Barcelona.
Lives and works in Berlin.