“Trembling” presents the video work HOME in an adapted and somewhat modified form. It involves a camera’s journey through the space of a miniature home which is projected in a new way, adapting to a different location: the backstage of the theater, which gently distorts and fragments the projection.
Memory has become an important catalyst in pushing animation to new and unchartered territories, often balancing on the edge between film and installation.
This micro-presentation highlights the narrative aspect of animated installations — animation works screened in museums, galleries, and spaces other than single screen-based theatrical venues.
The Family Portrait animated installation was developed as an integral part of my PhD research at NTU/ADMSingapore in 2019 however, the production of this work in traditional puppet animation technique took a fewmore years to complete.
Across 7 projections, this animated installation depicts a poetic, dark, and somewhat humorous social observation, in which family ties and relationships are broken down and dissected to pieces.
HOME is an art video recorded inside a fragmented miniature space of a diorama. In the video, this space appears as a compact and idyllic whole with a breath of warmth and coziness of a sunshine-flooded home. However, in reality, this is a cluster of small, broken, dissected walls and facades alike those that the artist uses in her animated puppet films.
MEMENTO is based on the (un)spoken experiences and memories of my grandmother Lea Balas Vidakovic, who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 14. The exhibition consists of animations, videos, soil, cakes, suitcases, documents and artefacts.
Through minute depiction of a tangible miniature world and it’s atmosphere, utilising visual metaphors and a range of editing approaches, this work features an open narrative structure. The animation triptych evokes the atmosphere of old Dutch paintings, where sisters are trapped in melancholy, facing the loss and emptiness over the missing one.
Splendid Isolation is an animation triptych done in traditional puppet animation technique. With uneven durations of about 90 seconds for each, the projections run in a loop without synchronisation. The loose story is structured to depict the same character in three different locations on each projection.
In the context of animated installations, gaps are present in the physical space between the projections in the gallery or any other space where the work is projected.