Border Stitching from OBORO on OBOROmobile.
In Border Stitching, Vessna Perunovich dwells emotionally and philosophically on the subject of boundaries, portraying a border place of her own identity positioned in-between traditions and homelands. Taking the experience of cultural displacement as a starting point she simultaneously investigates the autobiographical and the universal experience of migration as a space of both immobility and movement.
The network of ties, and lines woven together through repetitive, laborious processes in Border Stitching are at the same time suggestive of communication as well as separation. Merging the personal and political, the intimate and public, this multi-disciplinary work inhabits the borderline between irony, beauty, hope and despair.
Through continuous lines of ink, thread and graphite, Perunovich reinvents barriers such as walls and fences and represents them as soft configurations and woven, permeable structures. The architectural form of a wall or a fence is reproduced through processes that make reference to female practices such as sewing, knitting and crocheting. By utilizing materials and techniques, which were historically designed as ‘female’ (and which run counter to our technology-information saturated age) the work “stitches together” the division between traditional women’s needle work and fine arts. Furthermore, the interplay between construction and craft in Perunovich’s work renegotiates the traditional gender stereotypes as defined by her Serbian heritage enacted through her immigration from one cultural context to another.