Katarina Ranković
Katarina is an artist concerned with wriggling into her own work and wearing it like a second skin. She works in video, drawing, theatrical seances and has written a novel called Anomaline.
She does not write this in third person to give the impression that her thoughts are occupied by concerns of a higher order than administrative matters such as these, or to suggest that other enthusiasts have taken on the task to introduce her for her, but in fact out of modesty, to respect your space as you read this in the comfort of your privacy, so that you may scan her credentials and approve or disapprove of them without worrying about hurting her feelings.
Katarina completed her Bachelor degree in Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Arts and Masters at Central Saint Martins and these good places do not, sadly, guarantee that she is a good artist, it's only fair to say, but perhaps their inclusion here serves to assure you of her commitment to the monkish path of doing art continuously, again and again, for a long amount of time, and that she was twice ordained by these institutional powers, as a follower of the practice, her personal religion.
To be sure, Katarina loves universities, the romance of the scholarly life, and that of the passionate artist tinkering away in dark and sweet loneliness. She wants to be a ‘man of letters’ or a ‘natural philosopher’, like in the 19th century; she wants to be like Charles Darwin, Edwin A. Abbott, Mary Shelley and unabashedly she is trying to be like Leonardo Da Vinci, who can very comfortably make anachronistic appearances in any list. She wants to work at a candlelit, mahogany desk with hunchbacked shelves of obsolete books caving in over her like curious interlocutors.
The photograph above is seen by some to be a grossly misleading portrait of Katarina. It has been included here as a representation of her split autonomy. You will see, if you look closely, that she is being almost entirely occupied by a fictional character at the moment of photographic capture.
Katarina completed her practice-based PhD project, Scripting for Agency, at Goldsmiths College in 2022. Here she considered the fictional character as a prototype of artificial intelligence, and by putting herself at the mercy of characters of her own invention, attempted to measure how much of her selfhood is fictional.
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