With my numb fingers and lipstick, I draw tectonic disturbances,
I plan distortions, I paint black holes,
on which an army of women like me will dance.
whose hands also go numb, whose bodies cry songs,
waging wars within their own bodies.
Artist Nađa Kračunović, through humor, auto-theory, performance, and polyphony, summons an “army of women like me” into a process marked by chronic bodily conditions shaped over the past three years by multiple sclerosis (MS). This network of artistic notes invites both individual and collective reflection on feminized emotional labor, which has been rendered invisible within everyday relationships, society, and systemic structures.
Often a trivialized question How are you/we? It demands automated responses that, on a daily level, limit our understanding of ourselves and of possible worlds. Becoming both an individual and a multitude is not always welcome, as being molded into roles, singular identities, and positions makes us more accessible to fields of extraction. One of the key roles of art is precisely to shift, question, and provoke these boundaries. In doing so, it does not need to be megalomaniacal, precise, or canonically compliant; on the contrary. Its transformative power emerges in vibrations, neural skips, and confrontations with the sources of resistance to inevitable change.
Spider-woman, needle-woman, a woman whose head is burningArtistic methods become strategies of survival and living, centering the body as a wounded storyteller. Nađa uses humor as a key tool for translating symptoms into fictional characters such as fatigue, hysteria, tingling, headaches, and nausea. A body that deviates from normative functionality is declared wrong and inadequate; it becomes a living archive in which “colonial enclaves of power” vibrate. This also opens the question of belonging to or owning the body, and the imposed consent within the relationship between patient, medical worker, and the medical system.
Nađa playfully translates these dynamics in her works. Chronic superpositions and Look at her!. (..She is funded by a German foundation, she enjoys every ovation, doctors can’t tell if it’s ovulation or a nation?) Drawings on specialist referral forms, poetry, interventions on passport photographs used for immigration to Germany, knitted spider sculptures, plaster bones and spine, and speech become a cathartic polyphony of the body in cellular, physical, social, and political transition.
Dehumanized lives, Immigrant wives
Medical workers, Bodies with a price,
I stand here for you, speaking my broken tongues.
Through repetition, alterations, and the multiplication of roles and positions, the artist dissolves the molds into which patriarchy and capitalism daily compress us. She calls for the transformation of (internal) oppressive voices into curiosity that holds space for deeper listening toward an exit. As Paul B. Preciado (*I Am the Monster That Speaks to You*) also reminds us: “Anyone among you who would dare to dive into the kaleidoscope of their own desire and their own body, into their reservoir of nervous tension, into their own memory, might find within themselves a revitalizing excitement, a free energy that urges us to live differently, to change, to be different, to be, so to speak, radically alive.”
Text: Nataša Prljević
Nađa Kračunović (1996, Belgrade, Serbia) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her artistic practice encompasses voice, performance, drawing, and text through which she explores biopolitical practices of gender, illness, and citizenship, as well as everyday social relations. As strategies of survival, her works emerge from the female throat, personal diaries, intimate encounters, medical reports, and fiction.
Her international exhibition and performance practice includes the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Documenta 15 in Kassel, and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. She has participated in numerous residencies, including CRL – Central Elétrica (Porto, Portugal), DAAD Heritage for Communities (Luxor, Egypt), and Freie Radikale at Floating University (Berlin, Germany). She is the recipient of several artistic scholarships and mobility programs.
In her pedagogical and mentorship practice, she works in the fields of voice, performance, and artistic strategies; she leads a long-term workshop… How to Perform a Scream?, in which the voice becomes a tool of resistance, liberation, and collective imagination. She is a co-founder of a mobile multimedia institute… Crying Classroom i članica interdisciplinarnog ansambla Don’t Worry, It’s Out of Control.
Nataša Prljević is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and organizer. Through collaborative and collective feminist practice, she focuses on the role of art in developing collective imagination, transformative pedagogy, and justice. She cultivates collage and polyphony, developing various modalities and media in her artistic, curatorial, and mentoring work.
She received her education and work experience in Serbia, the United States, and Mexico. During her master’s studies, she taught at The New School/Parsons School of Art and Design, Brooklyn College, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She worked as executive assistant and curator at the artist residency program Residency Unlimited in New York (2016–2019). She is the initiator of the transnational platform HEKLER, which focuses on collectively questioning hospitality and conflict, and a member of the organizational team of the meeting point Četiri vode in Ljubanje, initiated by Jelena Prljević.
http://www.natasaprljevic.com/
