Angela Blažanović

Blažanović incorporates a sculpture made from crystallized rock collected from the shoreline of Rab, Croatia, her mother’s birthplace, with a photographic fragment of the same shoreline. The photograph, mounted on aluminum with a UV-print on its reverse, also includes a phytogram created using plants from the artist’s London garden. These elements form a dialogue between the physical and the ephemeral, examining the fragment as a self-contained, expansive form. For the artist, both fractured yet whole, it represents the waves of the sea evoked in the work’s title.

Photography serves as a means to explore themes of memory and displacement. Blažanović reflects on her diasporic identity and the tension between inherited and lived histories. Born in Germany to immigrant parents from Croatia and Bosnia, she grew up navigating the complexities of belonging to a place foreign to her ancestors, while trying to preserve her mother’s cultural roots. Her identity, shaped by overlapping geographies, languages, and traditions, remains fluid and fragmented, perpetually questioning the notion of "home."

The project’s origins lie in a chance moment during a darkroom session when expired photographic paper yielded unexpected results. The paper’s deterioration produced inaccurate colors of an ethereal, pink-hue that introduced a poetic quality. This accident became a guiding force, aligning the work with chance.