Lana Čmajčanin's Tailoring and Sewing installation takes the familiar geographic outline of Bosnia & Hercegovina and invites the visitor to re-make the map in their own image and according to their own personal history. This is a piece that offers the viewer an implicit shared intimacy with the artist, without physically having met. National and local spaces are some of the key determinants in which people locate their history and the development of their character, and this piece casts a very sceptical glance at the overarching, grossly over-simplified narratives of nationalism that would seek to flatten such individual histories in a broader, more easily manipulated narrative. More broadly, we can understand that any attempt to define a "nation" must acknowledge the near infinite "Bosnia-Hercegovinas" that exist in individual minds. It is suggested, perhaps, that examining the subtle differences between individual perception may be much more valuable and insightful a task, than trying to stitch together a glib, over-familiar farrago of "national myths", as the means to bind together a traumatised and dysfunctional territory. 

This is an artist that enjoys exploiting the obvious gaps between rhetoric and reality. Hence, in Čmajčanin's new piece 166987 Uboda (166987 Pricks), the brutally frank language of sexual power is rendered in the quiet, gentle craft of embroidery. There is an obvious enjoyment of the tension that this produces, a relish redoubled by double entendre.

Extract from Dispositions of intimacy by Jon Blackwood, exhibition catalogue 

Curated by Branka Vujanović & Jonathan Blackwood
Exhibition catalog, Sarajevo, 2012
English/Bosnian

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