SELMA ĐULIZAREVIĆ EXHIBITION
Selma Đulezarević – Karanović was born in Sarajevo in 1967. She studied at the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in the class of Professor Milica Stevanović. She also completed her postgraduate studies at the same faculty in 1997. She earned a Doctor of Arts degree in painting under the mentorship of Professor Anđelka Bojović in 2012. She has been a member of ULUS since 1995. She currently works at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade as a full professor. She has had 34 solo exhibitions in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belgium. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the country and abroad. Her works are in the collection of the Belgrade City Museum, the Nadežda Petrović Gallery in Čačak, the Contemporary Gallery in Subotica and the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
In 2010, Selma Đulezarević Karanović participated in the Symposium of the International Organisation of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians in Istanbul, entitled Cultural Exchange Between East and West: Kaftan and Its Influence in Fashion. In the same year, she became a member of this organisation. The thematic framework of this symposium had a stimulating influence on her artistic work. Although she is a painter by vocation, she began researching the kaftan, a traditional shirt of the peoples and nationalities from the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Since the author herself comes from Bosnia and Herzegovina, more precisely from Sarajevo, she places emphasis on the urban costume, noticing various depictions and ornaments on the shirts of women of Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths. One thing was common to all of them, and that was the beauty in the execution of various embroideries and weavings, as well as the dominant floral motif (rose, jasmine, tulip, lily of the valley,..). The importance of folk handicrafts, the richness of weaving in cotton, hemp and silk as well as embroidered decorations on clothing items, shirts, dresses, towels are sublimated in the new opus of Selma Đulezarević Karanović. Following the basic formal principles and patterns in the original embroidery, the artist paints and draws with textile paint floral decorations, song lyrics and messages. Collages made by combining different pieces of textiles have a special charm. This encounter of antiquity with objects of modern clothing creates new horizons not only of the aesthetic but also of the mental concept of a personal nature. The artist uses the white shirt from the folk costume as a metaphor for the permanent and the imperishable, as a symbol of the unbreakable bond of every woman with her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, generations ago. As the artist herself says, with these works she makes a special kind of gratitude to our ancestors from whom we inherited a sense of beauty. We can freely say that our grandmothers turned manual labor from an everyday necessity into an individual pleasure and a means of expression. Women in domestic conditions, excluded from any socio-political influence and public life of that time, through this type of activity become the forerunners of today’s emancipated women. Through various status or romantic messages (“Beauty is within us”, “Housewives, talk less so your lunch doesn’t burn”, “Dew fell on the meadow, I gave my beloved my hand”…) Selma parries the traditional and contemporary position of a business woman, exposed to new global challenges. She has written the verses of Vera Nedić on her wedding towels, her shirts are called “Covid Depression”, and her corsets are written with the names of antidepressants. Dresses, collages and other objects make the ambient installation entitled “Heritage-Burden” complex and multi-layered. Going through each segment of the aforementioned works, the artist gives us the opportunity to experience the past and heritage through the prism of the aesthetic, philosophical, material and immaterial segments of our individual and collective heritage, questioning our willingness to accept its weight.