With an exhibition inspired by a collection of spelling books the well-known writer also introduces herself as an artist in a different genre to the wider public.
At the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia in 1991, Dubravka Ugrešić accidentally ran across a spelling book from 1957, which, by the year of publication, could well have been her own. In her words: “Suddenly I had two new worlds emerging in front of me: a remote, forgotten world of the spelling book promising a happy future, and another, real, present world that was brutally denying that future.”
The episode was an introduction into her collecting of spelling books which in turn resulted with an essay published in her book The Culture of Lying, and also with a series of visual works presented at this exhibition. There are scenes from school life presented by little figures and drawings inspired by spelling books. The exhibition also shows the original alphabet and spelling books that she collected over the years, mainly from Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia. The exhibition presents this brilliant writer as an artist in a different genre and medium, not just as polygons for repetition of the themes already mastered, but as spaces in which she draws attention to some new motives in a playful and tender way.