I'm Going to Live a Hundred Years!
Katarina Radović
This long-term visual/literary study of my grandmother, i.e., ‘Great Mother’, source of life, and, at the same time, end to life, is a story about perseverance in difficult circumstances (she survived two wars – WWII and the 1990s Balkan bloodshed, and changed five countries on one and the same territory: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, SFRY, FRY, Serbia and Montenegro, and Serbia) and testimony to a strong will to live, perceived through many layers of memory – a story of presence and absence, guilt and forgiveness, abundance and deprivation, toughness and fragility, love and hate.
In this project, the photo material is presented in several forms: old photographs from my grandmother’s archive combined either with some recent photographs I took of her or with objects related to her; documentary shots taken in the last fifteen years of her life; and re-photographed posthumous installations.
Katarina Radović was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She studied History of Art at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK in the 1990’s and later acquired the BA Degree in Photography from the Academy of Arts ‘BK’ in Belgrade in 2006.
As a free-lance artist, she has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions and festivals in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Malta, Egypt, Japan, Senegal, USA, Israel, etc.
She received the Kultur Kontakt artist-in-residence grant in Vienna, Austria, in 2007; the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) grant for the project Until Death Do Us Part in 2009; and the artist-in-residence grant from the Fondazzjoni Kreattività in Malta in 2019. She also received a grant for attending a specialised course in photography at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria, in 2020.