Margareta Kern (born 1974) is a London based, interdisciplinary artist whose works question ways in which personal and intimate spaces are influenced by the socio-political movements in our contemporary lives.
A graduate of Goldsmiths College (1998), Kern has shown her work nationally including the Tate Modern, Djanogly Gallery and Castlefield Gallery, and internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Banja Luka, Bosnia & Herzegovina. She was the recipient of the Open Society Scholarship for students from the former Yugoslavia whose academic studies were disrupted by the civil war and has recently received funding from the Arts Council England (Clothes for Death, 2006/2007), the British Film Institute (Coffee and Desa, 2005) and most recently the British Council for the international tour of her solo exhibition Clothes for Living and Dying (2008).
"My works have always negotiated between the outer boundaries of identity, its socio-political context and the inner, subtler workings and needs of the self. I explore a relational way of working, where the site of engagement with the personal narratives, becomes the context within which the process of art making takes place.
In my current projects I use clothing and textiles as a way of opening and entering issues linked to gendered constructions of identity and its social, political and cultural contexts.
My experience of migrating from one culture to another, rather abruptly at the beginning of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, quietly underlines my work and interest in stories that resonate with unresolved questions of place, belonging, home and domesticity.
In my research I draw on diverse sources, from Feminist and Gender theories and writing, Post-Colonial and Post-Communist writing, Anthropology and Ethnography, to Poetry, Creative writing, personal and collective Hi-stories…"
Kern continues to explore notions of home and away, belonging and not-belonging, host and guest, strange and familiar. Meanwhile her sense of the fragmentation of her country, the former Yugoslavia, is now informed, in association with her mother, by domestic notions of cutting apart and sewing together, in the same way that the young women's graduation dresses are first seen as a whole on the Hollywood star, then envisaged as patches of material and finally reassembled in a new finished whole" Dr Alex Rotas, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Cardiff, UK.
Phd thesis 'Soft Touch: Visual Artists from Refugee Populations (UK) and Representations of Asylum in Contemporary Art, chapter 'Integration: New Configurations of the Present, Reappraisals of the Past', 2006.
PUBLICATIONS/REVIEWS selection
2007; The Big Issue, Review by Sarah Jane Downing
2007; ArtRabbit interview by Beth Greenacre
2007; 'Mortality' publication as part of international conference, 'The Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal', Routledge.
2007; a-n Magazine, July 2007 edition, Projects Unlimited, Clothes for Death
2007; 'What Remains' by Margareta Kern, Refugee Week Blog
2006; The Guide, Exhibition preview and Critics Choice, The Guardian
2005; Necessary Journeys Publication, published by the Arts Council England and Tate Modern, edited by Melanie Keen and Eileen Daly
2005; Time Out, Action Heroes, Election 2005 Reporter
2004; Third Text, Alex Rotas, Vol. 18, Issue 1, p51-60 AWARDS
2006/2007 - R&D Award 'Clothes for Death', Grants for Arts, Arts Council England
2006 - Individual artist award, Grants for Arts, Arts Council England
2005 - Travel bursary 'Necessary Journeys' from ACE and British Film Institute
2005 - Grants for the Arts Award, production of the new work 'Kolachnikov' for the 'KnotWorks' exhibition.
1995 - 1998 Recipient of the Open Society Institute scholarship
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