Setting: Dita Ethemi, Marija Stipišić Vuković
Experience of urban life in the 20th century has affected the visual media and the related possibilities of expression. The various approaches have included description, or rather accurate illustration, but also a critical, engaged stance towards the reality. Sometimes, however, especially in abstraction, interest in the visual may take the direction of exploring spirituality, in which the art itself can reach its absolute and attain freedom, while life regains its meaning, meanwhile lost in the urban chaos. Thus, Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie reflects a complex spiritual substrate based on mysticism and mathematics, at the sam timebeing a testimony of passionate jazz dancer.
As early as the 19th centuray, Caspar David Friedrich started that one must close one's physical eye in order to be able to grasp the image by the mind's eye. The new millennium, with its proclaimed prevalence of screen over image, has transposed all these tendencies into the field of virtual perception of the reality. Owing to the fluidity of that virtual sphere, information about the turbulently changing world can now travel withunbelievable speed. (...)
Barbara Vujanović
Dita Ethemi was born in Peje, Kosovo in 1985. She enrolledat the Academy of Fine Arts in Prishtina in 2003 where she graduated painting in 2008. In 2005 she participated in the project „Academy Remix“, Prishtina, Kosova; Frankfurt, Germany. In 2007 – 2008 she attendedEcole nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris and 2008 – 2009 she spent at the art residency in Paris. Today she lives and works in Prishtina.
