It’s a foggy Saturday night outside Saint Mary’s University
Art Gallery, and a small crowd has gathered for Vessna Perunovich’s
performance, “I Hug the World and the World Hugs Me Back.” The artist
is tethered to a lamppost by three long, thick bands of
elastic—blood-red against her black dress and white blouse. She
stands, her body tilted forward at a slight angle, arms outstretched,
until a passing pedestrian—a middle-aged, uniform-clad man with keys
jangling around his waist—agrees to engage. He approaches and
unleashes the best bear hug he can muster. “This is nice! I like this!”
he exclaims mid-embrace. When it’s over, he and his keys jingle away
and Perunovich readies herself for her next hug.
This performed hugging—an act that has seen her interfering in the
personal space of strangers all over the world since 2003—is all
about challenging our notions of intimacy, boundaries, and public and
private space. They are ideas that spill into most of Perunovich’s
painting, video work and mixed-media installations; a varied selection
of which is on view at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in a
mid-career retrospective exhibition called Emblems of the
Enigma.
Perunovich, a vivacious woman with blonde hair and seemingly
boundless energy, was born and raised in Belgrade, in a country once
known as Yugoslavia, and now called Serbia. She and her husband,
filmmaker Boja Vasic, immigrated to Toronto (where they still live)
with their young daughter in 1998, the same year she promptly set about
making art about displacement, identity and the notion of home.
They are certainly the forces behind “Splitting Up,” a well-worn
iron bed frame strung with lengths of bright red, stretchy fabric,
that’s at the heart of the exhibition. There, balanced precariously on
the taut fabric, is a long, old-fashioned double-handled cross-saw with
large, jagged teeth. The effect is, not surprisingly, violent and
vaguely disturbing.
Perunovich says that the work was created as former-Yugoslavia was
breaking apart. “Married couples from different ethnic origins were
splitting up, neighbours were turning against each other,” she says of
the time. She figured the bed (the place where we are born, spend a
third of our lives and often die) was an intimate setting in which to
explore these ideas. It’s no coincidence that the fabric bands look
like blood. “Blood ties can’t be severed so easily,” she says.
Perunovich admits that she still has an “ambiguous relationship to
the word ‘home.'” She says seeing Yugoslavia split apart was
heartbreaking. “All of a sudden, you don’t even have your home
country,” she says passionately, “and then you’re an immigrant and
you’re coming to a new country—and you wonder…can this be a new
home?” She investigates the idea of roots in works like “Continuum,”
wherein two sets of disparate boots are joined by a single pair of
legs. In nearby “Foundation,” a tiny pair of girly shoes is wedged into
the gaps in a cement block, a simple manifestation of childhood in a
country that no longer exists, or of the weak versus the impossibly
powerful.
But as much as Perunovich’s work deals with weighty issues, there is
still an air of playfulness—or at the very least, a curiosity and
openness—to her work. Indeed, the fact that she even works in as many
different media as she does, even though she’s only formally trained as
a painter (“it’s freeing to do things you don’t know much about,” she
laughs), reveals something of Perunovich’s fearlessness. In one of her
video works, she brazenly carries a bundle of pink balloons through a
village in Turkey, defying a call to prayer. In another, she builds a
seemingly impenetrable wall out of string.
And then there’s the hugging: a brazen act of affection and intimacy
in our non-touching world. At her performance outside SMU on that foggy
Saturday night, a shy student approaches cautiously, going in
reluctantly for an embrace. “It’s weird!” he says of the experience
when Perunovich lets him go. “It’s weird?!” she exclaims, fuelled by
his reluctance, her eyes twinkling. “OK. Give me another one.” And he
does—without hesitating. For a moment, he looks completely at home.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2009.