ARTIST STATEMENT

I see the results of my work as a hybrid between my European culture and formation, and my more recent experience in, and knowledge of Africa, that I have actively introduced in my artistic production. My experience of being born and raised in the former Yugoslavia undergirds my artistic production and sensibility. As a non-imperialist country, Yugoslavia has never seen Ghana, among others, as a resource to be abused, but rather as (especially due to the Non-Aligned Movement) a country with its own culture and the right to self-determination. Yet, getting to know more African culture in Ghana, I realized how little knowledge about African history, the history of colonialism, the African countries’ struggle for independence and especially about African art circulates in Europe. This has profoundly struck me and I seek to fill this lacuna in the years to come by further studying these aspects, let them influence more deeply my artistic production, and build a space Open House Studio (Ghana) and Panovci 9 (Slovenia) of North/South artistic encounters and exchanges that resists cultural hierarchies and divisions. Indeed, I am actively committed to cultural equality, which I seek to promote through artist forms of contamination. 

Tjaša Rener, 2023

Though the content of a painting is important, I am more interested in the technical execution of a particular piece: the medium the artist uses when creating art, how far he or she can go with the chosen technique, the possibilities the selected technique offers, and how he or she makes use of these possibilities.

I've always been interested in the interaction between the mediums of printmaking and painting. I first experimented with this combination by creating etching prints and woodcuts on which I later painted.

I spent the last year of my studies at International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I had my first opportunity to experiment with large-scale screen prints. It was then that I first reversed the procedure by printing on an already painted canvas. Despite knowing that other artists have experimented with this approach, the addition of screen printing to my practice has completely transformed my previous perceptions of painting as an image, painting as a medium and painting as a process.

Before moving to Accra, the capital city of Ghana, I spent a few years living in a rural, isolated area by the shore of Lake Bosumtwi, Kumasi. Though the process remains the foundation of my artistic expression, the content of my work is influenced by the everyday life of people in Ghana and the relationship among home, family, and society in this region. Economic discrepancies, people's attitude toward rapidly developing technology and increasingly excessive consumption influence my thinking, and subsequently, my art.

Recently, I have introduced new materials to my work such as Xerox, heat transfers and found objects. With each new work, I’m invigorated by the effects of the interactions among the new materials. I want to explore these novel effects in each new painting, realising, of course, that I have barely scratched the surface of my artistic endeavour.

Tjaša Rener, 2017