I am Not

„I am Not… – Did your Sense of Uncertainty Provoke Negation in You?“
Curator Bojana Stamenkovic
Solo exhibition, artist Thaer Maarouf

Have we lost identity, are we the same as before we crossed the border? Did we lose our identity due to the difficult process of integration? Are we to reconsider those who we become after the integration process? Did your sense of uncertainty provoke negation in you? Does it contribute to our cultural richness of the arrival of the new environment, and are we at all aware of it? Do they accept us with the diversity that we bring? When will we become accepted? Will we?

With these questions I was trying to find explanation with visual solutions which carry the sentence “I am not an artist”, “I am not a Muslim,” “I am not a refugee” …. Where it  also used the discourse of replacing emotion with the object, in this case with the pillow that becomes an identity object with a sentence of negation written on it. In the recent works of Thaer Maarouf  I found how he explore the cause and effect relationship of the factors of integration and the sense of loneliness. The discourse that the two terms are investigating continuously deals with both topics, failing to discern which of them has greater influence, or which of them is trying to resolve the other. The broad spectrum of different types of migration, of changing the environment in which we live and create in order to achieve the main form of survival, we are working hard to integrate. The actual integration is defined by a very wide range of problems; differences in mentality, cultural heritage, language, and many other layers that are part of this issue; a positive factor is the acceptance of a person who is a newcomer and as such it eliminates the feelings of loneliness that person carries.

This round of emotional wandering, he interpret through the objects pillow/ objects in which we’re trying to quench our thirst for emotion. The object becomes a solution, wandering between integration and loneliness, the catalyst of emotions which create deep confusion. They reflect our desire to belong to someone, the world or community.

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