How do artists learn through place, and how do these relations and practices shift with migration?
Led by producer, curator and researcher Jelena Sofronijevic, our next Reading Group considers the ecological undercurrents of artist and educator Zeljko Kujundzic’s multidisciplinary practice through two short texts and a film screening. These explore how Kujundzic’s practice developed out of an intimate relation to the sea and evolved over the course of his many travels and migrations in pursuit of education.
An excerpt from Torn Canvas (1957), the artist’s autobiography, recounts how his artistic practice was first and deeply inspired by the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia). Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute experimental film salvaged from the family archives, sees the artist swimming, fishing and exploring plant life underwater off the Isle of Mull in Scotland. ‘Tracing Zeljko Kujundzic in Scotland: Art and Migration in Post-War Edinburgh,’ by Jelena Sofronijevic, follows Zeljko’s movements from his birthplace of Subotica, via the UK, to British Columbia in Canada, where he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, now known as the Kootenay School of the Arts.