On the State of the Nation by Andreja Kulunčić - normalization between the lines

author Andreja Kulunčić
written by Bojan Mucko

 

Raising questions about the state of the nation may seem essentialist at first glance, because it seems to assume the stability of the national entity, the possibility of quantifying what it means to be Croatian. On the contrary, the question asked by the eponymous project of Andreja Kulunčić goes into the relational structure of this entity, reminding us that national identity is a discursive and performative construct. It is built by submitting to the dominant social discourse, and processed by maintaining the borders against nationally undesirable categories. The social groups that fall into the categories of otherness in the process were examined by Andreja Kulunčić in her project realized in 2008 and produced by Gallery Miroslav Kraljević.[1]



[1]           The project On the State of the Nation was made within the broader international project Zemlja ljudskih prava (Land of Human Rights) together with the curators Ivana Bago and Antonija Majača.