After the articles on the Desert of Atacama in northern Chile by Rodolfo Andaur, the next contributor of the Art Spy blog is Róna Kopeczky. As a Serbian citizen with Hungarian roots and educated in France, Rona has a deep and natural interest in the historical, political and cultural dichotomy between Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern Europe, and how it appears in contemporary art practices. In 2013 with Fruzsina Kígyós, she initiated Easttopics; a non-profit online platform dedicated to the promotion of the Eastern European contemporary art field. This expanding website and database is based on the knowledge, contacts and personal recommendations of the two curators. The site gives a fascinating overview of artists, art professionals, institutions and publications of the art-scenes of the following countries: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine.
In her series of articles written for the Art Spy blog, Rona examines the question of identification through the artworks of six women artists from Central-Eastern European countries. Therein she deals with the act and the process of identification and how it manifests. This can be individuals shaping their identity through a confrontation with authority or power, a culture, a higher social class or the patriarchal system. But this can also take place on a broader scale, for example when societies of the former Eastern Block (and not only those with post-communist positions) shape their contemporary identity and their relation with the attractive light of the European Union and Western Europe. The starting-point of the series is the action from 1975 entitled Identification by the Yugoslav performance artist of Hungarian origins Katalin Ladik. Based on this, the series explores different strategies of identification by five young women artists; Katarina Šević (Serbia/Hungary), Šejla Kamerić (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Tatiana Fiodorova (Moldova), Jasmina Cibic (Slovenia) and Luiza Margan (Croatia/Bulgaria).
/photo credit:Katarina Šević: Headdress, 2011, drawing and collage, A4 paper/
