In 2026., Tricky Women Tricky Realities, the world’s only festival dedicated to animation by women and genderqueer artists, celebrates its 25th anniversary. In collaboration with the festival, Bildraum 07 presents works by the Serbian-Croatian animation director, artist, and researcher Lea Vidaković, whose practice unfolds at the intersection of installation, expanded media, and traditional puppet animation.
At the center of Vidaković’s work lies a sustained engagement with perception. Her cinematic worlds take the form of carefully constructed miniature architectures that render the psychological interiority of her protagonists visible. Conceived from the outset as spatial constellations, her films operate simultaneously as cinematic and sculptural environments. The meticulous materiality of the handcrafted miniatures thus becomes both medium and artistic signature.
Vidaković’s films can be understood as spatial compositions—precisely structured, atmospherically dense, and shaped by poetic narrative forms that privilege mood, temporality, and embodied perception over dialogue. The international resonance of this approach is reflected in numerous awards for works such as Sisters (2012), The Vast Landscape – Porcelain Stories (2014), HOME (2020), and the widely acclaimed The Family Portrait (2023).
At Bildraum 07, this spatial mode of storytelling unfolds through Vidaković’s film Sisters. The work portrays three sisters suspended in melancholy, confronted with loss and with the emptiness left by the absence of another figure. For Sisters, Vidaković developed an animated triptych in which viewers determine the temporal unfolding of the narrative by choosing which image-space to follow. In this way, perception itself becomes an active gesture.
The triptych simultaneously evokes the atmosphere of Dutch Golden Age painting and explores the relationship between figures and interiors as a psychological field of resonance. Within its open narrative structure, the perspectives of the protagonists unfold like simultaneous scenes on a stage, rendering multiplicity and simultaneity tangible as a spatial form of storytelling.
This cinematic logic continues within the exhibition space. Through the presentation of puppets and props, Vidaković transfers her miniature world into physical space, expanding the filmic narrative into a spatial experience. A fourth room—concealed in the film and never shown directly—becomes visible within the exhibition. Here it functions as a conceptual key to Sisters: a silent center that spatially structures the narrative while revealing the psychological depths of the work.
Curated by Katharina Hoffmann
Exhibition dates: 13 March – 8 April 2026
Gallery
