archival pigment prints, 2020
Catalogue of 5,155 Miles (8,296 km) is a collection of images of various items tied to my family’s immigration. This series is rooted not only in distance, but in time – some items were brought with us from Bosnia upon arriving in the United States in 1997. Others were sent from family back home, acquired during visits over the years, or were purchased in response to events happening overseas, such as deaths that we couldn’t be there to mourn. I position these relics in front of bright colors that evoke the hues of interior socialist modern spaces that were commonplace in the former Yugoslavia. The simplified, two-toned backgrounds reflect the turn to modernism in the wake of the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, rebelling against the socialist realism that was so widely respected and applied in the Soviet Union and distinguishing Yugoslavia from the Eastern Bloc. The images emphasize isolation, symmetry, and flat, minimal color combinations. I celebrate the objects’ wear and age, highlighting diasporic attraction to remnants of the homeland, treating the objects as elements of a transnational, generational archived experience.