For centuries women were often the custodians and carriers of the oral tradition that kept alive the cultural and spiritual inheritance, indeed, the very identity of the community. Traditionally bound to hearth and home where they cared for household chores and the upbringing of children, women transmitted in their stories and lore the knowledge and moral values of the given society, taking on the role of emotional collector and creator of further stories, lore and legends, poems, beliefs, myths and sayings. Up to the modern age they would often have no access to formal education. This newly created parallel knowledge system was the guiding thread of the manner of life and conduct that they transmitted from generation to generation. The further recipients of this information, carefully packaged in terms of compunction, concern and familial love, psychologically shaped individuals whose behaviour would not infrequently be moulded by the fear of certain admonitions from sayings or traditions about those unfortunates who had sinned against social standards. This individual would internalise the voice, and it would become a moral principle, a conscious or unconscious powerful psychological instrument for the transmission of the thinking and experience of the previous generations and tended to determine the deeds and actions of his or her life.

Most important is the moment in which we become aware of these inherited outlines, these ropes that guide us like ships to safe harbour and seemingly safe choices. The act of becoming aware often comes in adulthood and maturity when we become aware of the ties that bind us and control us, when they start to pinch and strangle us, inhibit our actions in our relationships with others and totally enslave our spirits.

Artist Katarina Alamat Kusijanović places before us a narration of the origin of these bonds that often come into life benignly by the back door. She calls them well-intentioned gifts, manifesting them in small-sized pictures (21 x 14 cm) that look indeed like carefully wrapped presents. Such presents often come from those we love best, from our mothers and grandmothers, from those who have had an important hand in our upbringing during our childhood. And for this very reason it is hard to recognise them as the recurrent destructive pattern of our development coming as they do with good intentions from people close to us.

Implicit in these gifts are all the sayings, the admonishments and the terrors and pains that we lug behind us in our lifetime like an invisible suitcase. Alamat Kusijanović spent her childhood summers on Kalamota Island, three kilometres away from her native Dubrovnik. There she was steeped in the oral tradition that formed her child’s mind. About going out in the afternoon, when the bogeywoman from around the corner came to pick up children, about the black cat that presaged misfortune, about respecting the rules for the sake of going to heaven, for there went those who were good and wished everyone good day and never said I won’t. 1 Engineering a sense of fear in children out of concern for their safety is actually also a mechanism for the control of their conduct, the recurrent pattern of which is unconsciously manifested in the lives of the adults, where the traces of them are visible.

Alamat Kusijanović says: “Implicit in almost all the gifts we get from loved ones is a mode of submission or deference so that we should meet expectations and obtain love. Sometimes this love is withheld, sometimes we withhold it from ourselves out of uncertainty and the want of confidence in ourselves. The desire to be the best we can often leads us to renunciation and complaisance.”

This deference occurs ceaselessly in our lives, the individual falling under the pressure of the rope, understanding the danger of its strength. The packets she creates are thus diverse. Some are packed up neatly and attentively, some are coming apart, sometimes are even burst open, and some lastingly sealed in chastity, the motif of lace and curtains that she uses mostly iconographically related to a house or household into which brides enter innocent.

The knots of ropes on the larger pieces, the beginnings of which are sometimes hard to find, the way of untying them symbolizing our interior discipline. They are often hidden by our conscious and unconscious behaviour patterns as far as the point at which they break and we attain awareness, when, in conversation, therapy or meditation we can understand and get down to their sources and causes, slowly getting free of the given ropes. But hiding them and letting them penetrate deeply like veins in the body, we do not always succeed in freeing ourselves – only through them wearing away, or the passage of time when the ropes snap or come untied, do we reach the moment of change.

Alamat Kusijanović reaches the conclusion that "packages that remain permanently wrapped often lead to discontent, sadness, depression, anxiety, and sometimes to severe states of amnesia”.

Alamat Kusijanović puts into her new series of works her own experience, with the actual work on these mentally demanding works requiring actually hard physical labour. During this process, the painter puts on numerous layers of chalk that involves a long period of boiling, sieving and preparing the chalk to put on the support in multiple layers. All these applications make the painting heavier, just like those experiences in life that make us heavy, torpid and unready for the great changes that we need.

Liberation from the fetters is the theme of a series of works in ink an acrylic on canvas by an Italian painter who resides in Berlin, Yvonne Andreini. The collaboration between these two artists started while they were socialising and working together during an IN/SU/LA residency on the Italian island of Ventotene in 2024 that grew into a deep friendship and a shared narrative thread in the exhibition of their works in Vienna.

Andreini carries out the undoing of the fetters of figuration through a clear reduction of motif to abstract and highly rhythmised planes. They produce an exceptionally dynamic composition along the lines of the one-off Futurist forms of sculptor Umberto Boccioni and of the abstract vibrations of the sound and spirit of Wasily Kandinsky who in his philosophy of painting observed the sonority of colour. 2

As against the highly marked dynamism of the abstract motifs, figurative elements of static architecture also infiltrate into the picture, permitting the abstract explosion of the gathered mass. The recognisable elements of classical Italian architecture are used as backdrop to the action that unfolds before us, similarly to the use of architecture in the Metaphysical painting of for example Giorgio de Chirico. But Metaphysical paintings are subdued, spectral and empty, showing mostly empty squares or piazzas, while the painting of Yvonne Andreini gives off vitality, liveliness and energy, using just elements of the architecture and never the whole of the space. Her visual space is often composed of just chromatically mute surfaces that like multiple mirrors divide the composition into an apparently infinite number of motific patterns. If the composition is thus fragmented, it is also remarkably compact. A word the artist herself will often use to describe her work is phantasmagoria, a dreamlike condition, fantasy or unreal illusion, a state of chaos in which reality and illusion, or fiction, are not clearly demarcated like the fusion of abstract and figurative elements of which Andreini’s painting is composed.

Clearly perceptible is a skilled and adroit drawing, with which the composition is built, developed with an even chromatic palette, whether with dominant reds or blues. Her painter’s brushstroke is at once expressive, intuitive and rapid and yet has the precision and meticulousness of the drawing, the gesture of her suggestive line being firm and confident.

The powerfully surging energy in her work wells out of the static architecture and continues to rise without a precisely determined goal. This is energy like a force of nature that does not disappear but turns into other forms of energy, form symbolising the strength of the energy at a given moment. She changes her structure and style like the river motif in the composition of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana Vltava. One of the most performed compositions, Vltava gives an acoustic description of the course of the famed river that starts in two small springs, the hot and the cold streams, eventually uniting into a single strong and mighty river that passes through forests and meadows. The score follows this transformation of form of water, the rhythm changing from easy babbling to the loud melody of the rushing of a large river.

Although the visual compositions of Yvonne Andreini resemble sudden and unlooked-for explosions or outpourings of water, the artist manages to create a balance between the tense parts of the body of the newly created form and the static part, which, like the stem of a plant, tries to keep the body grounded. Bodies start to take on biomorphic characteristics, behaving like living organisms that always strive for movement, whether to do with the plant’s ability to bend in its search for the sunniest side or to bow, stretch and break in the midst of various atmospheric conditions.

Andreini introduces the three-dimensionality of geometric forms in motion onto the two-dimensional canvas where the observer feels that the composition does not stop within the frame of the picture, but goes on in the mind beyond the physical boundaries of the work of art.

It is actually this transgression of the physical boundaries and the penetration deep into psychoanalytical patterns of behaviour in which tension and interplay coexist with the static nature of the scene that is the link connecting the works of Alamat Kusijanović and Andreini. These two women artists emotionally bare themselves in their works, revealing numerous layers of the life experiences of which we are constituted. Human identity is never one-dimensionally determined or fortuitous, just as the encounter of these two authors at the exhibition is not accidental: it is the outcome of dialogue through work and time during which their own identities have been contemplated, woven from various ropes, carefully wrapped packages and vortices of abstract elements that we cannot precisely define because they are located on the border between conscious and unconscious, reality and illusion, like the alternation of fields of energy in Andreini's painting. The deeply introspective works of these two artists ponder – through personal, historical and cultural prisms - the role of the individual in society, in which in the visual medium they explore how experience and the role of the individual are shaped through immediate and universal narratives. It is in visual representation that they find a way of transforming the fragmented experiences that in this shared space interweave the personal and collective, the intimate and the public, the covert and the overt, releasing the therapeutic potential of these exceptionally powerful and persuasive works.

Jelena Tamindzija Donnart