Tanja Softić is a member of the International Expert Team of the Institute for Research of Genocide, Canada
Tanja Softic´ was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (former Yugoslavia) in 1966. She holds an undergraduate degree in panting at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Sarajevo and graduate degree in printmaking at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She works in the media of printmaking, drawing, photography, artist book and poetry. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship and Soros Foundation—Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant. Her work is included in numerous collections in the United States and abroad, among them New York Public Library, Library of Congress Print Department and New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia. She participated in numerous international print exhibitions, including 12th International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland, 2009 China Sanbao International Printmaking Exhibition, Jingdezhen, China and 6th Novosibirsk International Graphic Biennial, Russia. In 2001, she won a First Prize at the the 5th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan in 2002. She completed print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute and Anderson Ranch’s Patton Print Studio. Since 2013, she has been working on Catalog of Silence, a book of essays, photographs and poems about post-war Sarajevo.
Softić’s work addresses factors of cultural hybridity that shape the identity and world view of an immigrant: exile, longing, translation, and memory. The visual vocabulary of her work suggests a displaced existence: fragmented memories, adaptation, revival, and transformation. For Softic, memory is the virtual self and, paradoxically, our most authentic self. Her work is informed by the interest in overlays of personal and historical memory, in the larger conversations on cultural identity, displacement and witnessing the crumbling of the world order based on the concept of nation-state in post- 9/11 world.
Softic is Professor of Art Practice in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Richmond, where she teaches printmaking, drawing and the art of the book. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Cataloue of Silence – Sarajevo’s Museums and Libraries, 20 Years after the War
https://tanjasoftic.exposure.co/catalogue-of-silence
