"Migrant Universe" contains 18 mixed media works on paper, according to a UR press release announcing the grant:
“The series addresses factors of cultural hybridity that shape the identity and world view of an immigrant: exile, longing, translation and memory,” said Softic, who is an immigrant herself, having come to the United States from Bosnia. “In Migrant Universe, the drawings function as a re-arrangeable continuum of maps, landscapes and portraits of memory and identity,” she said.
Softic maintains a fairly comprehensive online gallery of her work at the University of Richmond's website, including several of the "Migrant Universe" series. She addresses many of the themes inherent in this series in her artist statement, also on the site:
The visual vocabulary of my drawings and prints suggests a displaced existence: fragmented memories, adaptation, revival, and transformation. Because I do not live and work within the comfort or boundaries of the culture in which I first learned to observe, interpret and engage the world, I have the arguable privilege of having lived more than one life. My memory is my virtual self and, paradoxically, my most authentic self. Yet, memory is a process that involves erosions and accretions that occur with any reconstructive, interpretative or artistic act. One re-connects that which has been broken, fragmented or overlaid. Re-membering becomes an act of reconstruction, where one works with what is there and tries to visualize what has been lost. Because each act of memorization necessarily involves interpretation, there can be no objective recollection. Nor is there full erasure; like matter, memory seems to persist by transforming.
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