I sit and absentmindedly stare ahead. Thoughts jump around in my head, one after another, and I don’t know what to do first. The walls of my room are empty, lacking any touch of personality. I remember my grandmother. The wallpapered living room alternating bright shades of green and orange. Floral motifs appearing sporadically on pillowcases and crocheted tablecloths. I feel sad. In the cycle of work obligations, constant tasks, and stress from increasing pressure not only in the cultural environment, I create a coloring book in my head. The black lines of those ubiquitous grandmother’s patterns and the empty spaces that I gradually fill in with crayons. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like it, but suddenly I’m calmer.

The exhibition I Might Cry by artist Sophia Sadžakov opens up a fragmented scene of memories of Sophia’s grandmother, communicated through elements of interior design from the second half of the 20th century. Although it may seem like we find ourselves in a panelák (panel apartment building) with some of our grandparents in a Czech housing estate, Sophia shares fragments of her Serbian grandmother’s apartment with us. Through ornaments and wallpapers, she creates a participatory space for collective coloring and sharing of personal experiences with burnout. The phrase “izgorela sam” (=I have burned out) becomes the central motif of the entire exhibition. Sadžakov symbolically urges us to gradually seek inner strength through which we are capable of eventually stepping out of the given boundaries not only of the coloring books themselves but also perhaps of our notions entrenched by binding social norms.

I Might Cry leaves us in an ambivalent place, in an unclear disposition. How to deal with the impossibility of visiting and maintaining relationships with loved ones in the relentless temporality of precarious conditions in culture, who, unlike the rest of the family, decided not to emigrate at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s? In Sophia’s work, one can perceive a subtle nostalgia that is common to a significant part of the second generation of the ex-Yugoslav diaspora. Not only the vanished country but especially the associated idea of life in socialism often becomes an indirectly lived memory of a world where things, just like the ornaments on the walls of grandmother’s living room, at least seemingly had their solid place and meaning. The breakup of Yugoslavia, like in many ways the desired societal breakdown of solid positions and meanings, brought with it a different, more individualized form of freedom, from which new forms of oppression soon began to emerge. How can memories or various handicraft practices then become a way to not only escape current forms of oppression but also attempt to disrupt them?

It is clear that in order for changes leading to a more sustainable organization of time independent of the amount of money to occur, systemic restructuring is needed not only in the cultural sector but also in the approach to work and subsequently in reevaluating one’s own amount of free time and values within all relationships. We no longer want to maintain only those relationships that are visible through the bonds of the nuclear family. Instead, we could attempt to care for and perceive them on a daily basis with everyone we come into contact with.

Sophia’s work draws from painting, and due to her interest in recurring patterns and ornamentation, she regularly touches upon the theme of women’s handicraft techniques. These techniques, especially during socialism, transformed into practices of women’s labor. Although it may have seemed like an important emancipatory moment in the division of gender-conditioned work, household labor was forgotten. Thus, under the guise of equality, women added not only the invisible work of caring for family and household but also the labor-intensive work traditionally associated with men. In contemporary art, this now very common craft turn can be associated with escapism. However, Sophia, through deliberate imitation and openness to audience participation, restores the potential of these practices and seeks ways to disrupt various forms of oppression through their creation.

Sophia Sadžakov is a visual artist and cultural producer based in Stuttgart, Germany. In her artistic practice, she translates her interest in ornaments, everyday materials such as carpets, sidewalk chalks, cakes, and family history into site-specific drawings and installations. Ornament, for her, is a sign of rhythm, movement, storytelling, and labor. Sophia studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and the Estonian Academy of Fine Arts in Tallinn. She has completed a number of artistic projects as part of the collective Nachtsicht. Among other places, she has exhibited in Stuttgart, Luxembourg, and Belgrade.

— Collective Cejla (Kristýna Gajdošová, Barbora Ilič, Risto Ilič, Monika Rygálová and Tereza Vinklárková)