Nina Sumarac
Nina Sumarac, born 1972 in Belgrade, Serbia
lives and works in Cyprus
Stay at Schafhof: Spring 2024
Nina Sumarac
Nina Sumarac (b.1972, Belgrade) is a Cyprus-based interdisciplinary artist with a mechanical engineering and fine art background.
Sumarac's artistic practice delves into the essence of global and bio-political narratives that shape our collective consciousness. Through a poetic and metaphorical lens, she critically examines and weaves together various social and political issues, challenging the embodiment of socially constructed stereotypes at both personal and collective levels. She aims to foster new ways of thinking and explore alternative perspectives. Drawing upon her passion for engineering, art, and philosophy, her current evolution revolves around intermedia art, and new technologies, while integrating (without limiting herself to any specific) the other artistic practices. With the desire to explore healing and empowerment, she is particularly interested in investigating the complexities of human existence in the contemporary era of rapidly advancing technologies. Her work examines ideologies about personal, social, and political boundaries, the intricate relationship between organic and AI organisms/algorithms, and the power dynamics emerging from these discussions.
Sumarac attended the Polytechnic University for New Technologies in New Belgrade, where she pursued studies in mechanical engineering and computer numerical control systems. She holds a BFA from Buckinghamshire New University in the United Kingdom and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Cyprus College of Art in Larnaca. She is an awarded artist. Her project’s presentations have been supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus, and some have become part of the State Gallery of Contemporary Art Cyprus collection.
Sumarac’s projects have been featured in venues including the CICA Museum in South Korea, NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol, the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, ALP MoCA Bacini dell'Arsenale Nord Venezia, Leopoldo Gotuzzo Art Museum Brazil, fu:bar Zagreb, Biennial Technology Turin, the Autonomous University of Mexico State UAEMEX, Stuttgart Film Festival, Winona State University USA, XOR Experimental Research and three pavilions of the 6th Wrong Biennale.
For more than fifteen years, she has worked at Toonachunks Animation Studio. Additionally, she contributes as a team member to the Lab for Animation Research, a research centre affiliated with the Department of Fine Arts at Cyprus University of Technology.
The work KO:VIDi alludes to the workings of our bilateral negotiation between data footprints and an identity matrix powered through mis/information around transmission and processing. The power dynamics that fuel this process are highlighted in the way partial animation feeds into still images to create the illusion of what and who comes into being. Surprisingly perhaps, in an age of information overload, there is a growing ambiguity around the participants involved, which the pandemic, with its global outreach equal to that of the internet, has highlighted even further. Ko -Vidi (who sees in Serbian) is symbolic of the anonymous eye in the ‘cloud’ that tracks, traces and constructs selfhoods with unknowable futures.
Dates in Freising
Residency Program
Downloads
Booklet about the AIR-Program
for screen
(PDF, A4, 11 pages, 864 KB)
print quality
(PDF, A4, 11 pages, 14,8 MB)
Artist-in-residence
The artist-in-residence program takes place in the framework of the European Art Fellowship of the District Council of Upper Bavaria.
During the stay of the guest artists in Freising presentations and open studio days provide the possibility to meet with and know more about the artists. There is always the option to arrange individual visits and meetings as well.