Neli Ružić, A Plaque (two mountains), video SD, stereo sound, 6:26, 2016

In my work I research personal and collective memory and oblivion in relation to transitional identities. I use different media, such as photography, objects, installations and video installations and I often resort to work in process over longer periods of time. Some of my works are envisaged as time machines and the problem of time, heterochrony and memory is scrutinized in all of them. The experience of migration and the geographical, historical and personal discontinuities are reflected in my works in several different ways: as absence and repetition, traces and new marks (palimpsest), as well as transformations. The social and the emotional overlap in them, as do the utopias from the past and the personal micro-utopias, history and landscape, post-memory and actuality. In my works for the exhibition of the project ‘From Diaspora to Diversities’ I make a connection between different times and places. The video A Plaque (two mountains) records my father’s recollection of his brother’s disappearance in September 1943 on the mountain of Mosor, while the video titled Bandera is a reaction to the disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero in Mexico on 26 September 2014. The legend under the work is changed every morning to mark the changed number of nights that have passed since the disappearance of the students.

Neli Ruzić (1966, Split) graduated painting from the Faculty for Applied Arts in Belgrade (1990) and she attended post-graduate studies at Facultad de Artes, UAEM, Mexico (2013). She worked actively on the Croatian art scene until the end of the 1990s when she left for Mexico. She taught at ENPEG La Esmeralda, Mexico City (-2012.); UAEM Cuernavaca, Estado de Morelos (-2007). As part of Tránsitos, Diplomado en Investigación, Experimentación y Producción Artística Transdisciplinaria, Centro Nacional de lasArtesCENART, Mexico City, she coordinated trans-disciplinary workshops in the period between 2008 and 2011. She was awarded the second prize of T-HTnagrada@msu.hr, of the Museum of contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2016; the Conacyt grant in Mexico (2012 and 2013); the Arts Link grant in 1996 and was the artist in residence in the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, USA. She was also awarded the prizes of the Mediterranean Youth Biennale and of the Modern Gallery in Rijeka in 1993. She returned to Croatia in 2012 where, in 2014, she began teaching in the School for Visual Arts in Split and also runs the Gallery Skola.