In a friendly collaboration between "Crick" - a festival for critical culture and the Festival for Feminist Culture and Action "Female First", a project by the internationally known artist Shejla Kamerić is presented for the first time in Skopje.

The exhibition entitled "We come with a bow" by Sejla Kamerić was opened on September 27 in the Cifte Hamam facility at the National Gallery. The curator of the exhibition is Natalija Paunić.

The multitude of gender, political, artistic, aesthetic and socio-cultural perspectives of the artist are intertwined in her previous works. The presented works of Šejla Kamerić in Skopje examine the long-standing portrayal of women as witches and/or objects.

Alluding to the well-known thematic interests of radical feminism, socialist feminism and post-structuralist views, the exhibition also aims to shed light on ordinary, domestic and familiar everyday elements and to highlight issues that usually receive little attention.

- The title "We come with a bow" can allude to a bow - favor, but also to a bow - a gift, and essentially refers to the position of women in patriarchal society and to the fact that, in a way, women in different contexts are treated as accidental or intentional gift. Although that may sound like something positive, but in essence we know that it is not - curator Natalija Paunic explained to "Kulturen Pechat".

The artist Sejla Kamerić (Sarajevo, 1976) lives and works in Berlin, Istria and Sarajevo. She studied at the Art Academy in Sarajevo. It deals with themes arising from non-linear historical narratives and personal stories. Kamerić focuses on the politics of memory, the forms of resistance in human life and the particularities that result in women's struggle.

- The process of creating my works starts from something very intimate, which means local, and then I try to find the general characteristics of the work that universally connect us all. I try to find the points of coincidence of my intimate with the same or similar in someone else, because those points of commonality, or of shared experience and emotions, are the space in which we communicate and connect with each other. I draw inspiration for the works from everything that surrounds me, but the choice falls on what affects me most from the inside and conditions me as a person. Empathy is very important and I think it is very important to feel the emotional states of other people - said Sejla Kamerić for "Kulturen Peć".

The author Šejla Kamerić and the curator Natalija Paunić have been collaborating for two years and have had several projects. Fragments of their project "Mother is a bitch", which was presented this year in Belgrade, are now also presented in Skopje, and then they plan to present it to the world public.

Natalia Paunić is a contemporary art curator and writer from Belgrade, Serbia. She graduated in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, 2017, after completing her MA from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade in 2015. She works as a director at the Eugster II Belgrade gallery, and also runs a nomadic project space called Vozhdovacka Gallery. which operates responsively to the architecture of different places.

(The text was published in "Cultural Press" No. 148, in the print edition of the newspaper "Free Press" on October 1-2, 2022)