Marija Šabanović, Apple Yi Jiang
Curated by Justina Špeirokaitė
Mixed media such as photography, collage, narration, and display objects.

The project LOOP focuses on how the political system in combination with traditional culture treats women through time. It investigates how it manages to change them and how that changes the way women then raise their children and especially their daughters. Also, how does the woman’s labour, her body and her mental state contribute to maintaining the system and at what cost?

Marija Šabanović and Apple Yi Jiang are portraying these relations by telling their personal stories.  They are investigating if there is a difference related to their country of origin – Yugoslavia and China. The stories are coming from these two countries that have very different cultures but also share more than just a communist past. They are stretching through a couple of decades carefully observing the political circumstances: in Yugoslavia from the  WW2 through socialism, the breakup of Yugoslavia and transitioning into capitalism, and in China before and after the cultural revolution, the birth control policy and the economic reform that opened China’s economy for the capitalist world.  

This project was developed as a collaboration with Apple Yi Jiang within the annual program of QUESTION ME & ANSWER.

The artworks were presented in the group show APPROXIMATING.
October 2022, AG18 Gallery

___Apple Yi Jiang
is an architectural designer and a PhD student. Her research focused on multigeneration co-living in China’s ageing society. She received a Master’s degree in Architecture at Sejima Studio at the University of Applied Art Vienna. She had been working in several outstanding architectural firms for 7 years after her bachelor’s study at the Central Academy of Fine Art. Her interest remains in future living environments and exploring other forms of expression for design, thoughts, and concepts.