Fractured Selves. War drawings Sarjeo. 1997
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BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF Fractured Selves
The images of broken, lost people from former Yugoslavia like those photographed by Charley G. Cupic represent for me the violence and suffering inflicted on the individual by politics, by history and by society. I have created images which reflect my feelings on these issues and for the most part are denunciatory rather than affirmative. When I react to the subject of war my most immediate and enduring thoughts and feelings are of mortality, vulnerability and victimisation. For me the victims are the essence of war. Fractured Selves is about these victims.
Dealing with the subject of Sarajevo I have had to contend with the morality of using the suffering of others to make art as well as the relevance of making paintings in relation to existing photographs. During the past two years I collected newspaper and magazine articles and slowly began to see these images as documentary material which could be absorbed into my working processes. The sense of actually witnessing an event in the media photographs is re-imaged in my paintings and this transformation opens up an emotional and intellectual relationship to the war that photographic documentation does not allow. These processes became a metaphor for fragmentation and disintegration and a commentary on the lives of ordinary people.
Vivienne Dadour 1997