Dragana Travas’ artistic practice includes different investigations and experiments in language and space, often leading to the cultivation of paradoxes. Her work is mainly site-specific and forces viewers to first get accustomed to the environment in which the work slowly emerges. She pays attention to detail and explores macro-narratives, employing minimalist interventions and gestures. The title of her thesis, ‘Perception, Body, Space, Language, Site-Specificity and Documentation’, illustrates the range and complexity of the visual language and issues that she deals with. Referring to conceptual and land art of the 1960s, as well as neo-conceptual art from the 1990s, Dragana has succeeded in defining her own position. Documentary practices were already applied in the 1960’s as a means of showing or registering performance or site-specific work, but Dragana employs photography and photographic slides in a new, investigative and contemporary manner. Revisiting such issues as documentation, perception, space and site-specificity also means reinvesting the language of photography and her installation-like settings, taking them to a new level of expression, consistent with the contemporary context and modes of perception in art.

Katarina Zdjelar