FAMILIAR FANTOMS

Agrina Vllasaliu, Alma Gačanin & Glorija Lizde

KODA/RU House, #404B Colonels Row, Governors Island, New York 10004

May 13–28, 2023

Growing up in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, Agrina Vllasaliu, Alma Gačanin, and Glorija Lizde explore how collective, intergenerational, and personal memories of war have shaped their identities and family histories. The exhibition title references Slavenka Drakulic’s essay, My Father’s Pistol (1991), in which a familiar phantom, a long-forgotten ghost of war, resurfaces when she first holds her father’s Beretta. In the works on view, all kinds of ghosts haunt the viewer: the land that keeps score of the battles that scarred its surface, the home abandoned before it could ever be inhabited, and the raincoat carrying the weight of history.

Notions of belonging, migration, and nationhood are brought together in poetic meditations via photography, video, installation, and text. Presented in the United States for the first time on Governors Island, a former military base, the site-specific iterations by Vllasilu, Gačanin, and Lizde create a dialogue with the built environment where the specters of history are ever present. With a war currently waging in Europe, the fabric of another society is torn, and all-too-familiar ghosts of the past return to pose the same questions again.

Curated by Veronika Molnar

Photos by Glorija Lizde

We are greateful for the support of Residency Unlimited. Find out more about the event on RU's website. 

This program benefits from the support of The Trust for Mutual Understanding. We are also grateful to BuBu Residency.