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Maja Kulenovic is a Toronto
based artist. She studied art at the Ontario College of Art
and Design (AOCAD), Mimar Sinan University in
Istanbul, Turkey and Chelsea College of Art and Design
in London, England (MA in Fine Arts). She has exhibited
in Toronto, London, Istanbul and Kyoto; also, she was one of the
founders of the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto.
Her most recent exhibition has been a three people show at the
Sable- Castelli Gallery in Toronto, February 1999
Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts is an artist- run space
and support network with about 60 members, located in downtown
Toronto.
Maja Kulenovic's work is focused on
the portrait as analyses of character, behaviour and communication.
Both personal and conceptual, her work is rooted in her personal
experience as much as in her private research in psychology. Over
the past few years, she has completed several series of self-
portraits, through which she has explored individualism as a philosophy.
Kulenovic is interested in the multi- ideological values of the
society, and how they reflect on the attempts of each individual
to construct his/her own systems of belief and behaviour.
Her latest project is a series of seven oil on canvas self- portraits
entitled Caprice, which will be exhibited at the Propeller
Centre in Toronto, June 9-23 1999.
Caprice images have undergone a series of transformations
through several media: performance, photography, computer manipulation
and painting, which is Kulenovic's essential medium. Initially,
she had introduced the photography and manipulation in the preparation
stage prior to painting. However, the interaction of the virtual
and the concrete eventually became an integral part of her concept.
Kulenovic's transformations are going on in a kitchen, which she
considers `the heart of a home'. It is a place where the material
meets the spiritual, and where technology meets the body. Kulenovic's
bizarre characters and situations appear as products of both the
mass culture and the inner tension within an individual.
Kulenovic's quasi- archetypes are a synthesis of reality and fiction.
In today's imagination, the clear- cut division to the black and
the white has given way to a zone of grey. Although still fictional,
contemporary archetypal characters are in their complexity getting
closer and closer to the real- life personalities. The experienced
reality and imagination in today's world seems to be overlapping.
Kulenovic ponders the individual attempts to sharpen the blurry
area between these two.
Humorous and serious at the same time, these works are based on
scrutiny as well as on play.
Although in this project Kulenovic is present as the subject,
these works are not self- portraits in the classical sense. Rather,
they are performances in which the artist used her own physiognomy
in order to explain the inner states which interested her. The
concept behind the whole project tells more about the artist than
the individual expressions on each one of the `self portraits'.
In that sense, Caprice is a parody on self- portraiture
and portraiture in general.
