Nika Pećarina
Artist in Residence September 2023, Croatia /
© Nika Pećarina
Nika Pećarina (b. 1992) lives in Zagreb where he is busy with audiovisual and performing arts, ceramics, poetry, and an everlasting interest towards food, pleasure and well-being. He takes notice of sex, thingness, and the transformation of matter, i.e., the relation of work and the physical, followed by the distinctiveness and effects of media, measure, form, and the visible, delicacy, smoothness, and smallness.
His interest in performativity brought about collaborations for various dance performances, as well as work on films, video design for theatre, and art-related pedagogy. He participated in the work of self-organized and non-governmental initiatives and projects in the fields of culture and media, student and minority rights. He's exhibited, performed, and screened his work at various exhibitions and festivals such as the Queer Musem Vienna, ADAF Greece, 25FPS Festival Zagreb, Multimedia Cultural Centre Split, Camberwell Space London, Pitchwise Sarajevo, Psu glede cvijeća at park forest Marjan and Praktika gallery, Split, Crvena, boja žerene zemlje at gallery Jedinstvo, Zagreb.
STATEMENT
The project for The Artist-in-Residence Programme aims to explore the so-called transsexual voice, while looking to trace ways in which the notion of identity can precondition political solidarity. Feeling one’s way through the social and intimate of trans culture, the project focuses on searching for critical approaches to the use of sound guided by the practices of listening. It mediates questions such as the possibility and the political dynamics of the exchange of voices, as well as desire that is not in question, among others – inquiries in beauty, harmony, musicality, masculinity and femininity, the aesthetics of queer tones and the preservation of personhood.
Speech, sound and performance are used as means of composition in which listening is considered as an act of participating in and embodying different forms of knowledge, experience and awareness. Thinking through a trans timbrality I plan on orbiting around the notion of the voice both as a material issue in the medium of sound and as a mediator of social relations - as the content of speech or language in the medium of text and a political or symbolic signifier of a subject forced to reflect on its own objecthood.