Iva Kontic

There Far Away shows a group of elderly people in a nursing home in Zagreb, Croatia, singing songs from their youth during one of their weekly singing meetings. After the last notes of “There Far Away,” an old Serbian patriotic song originating from the First World War, the group decides to sing “Let the Wind Blow from Neretva,” a traditional Bosnian love song from the area of the city of Mostar.

Confronted with their physical strength and the resilience of their memories, and with some even seemingly maintaining a clear consciousness of the present moment, they all sing with little regard for the different origins or political connotations of their repertoire, particularly in relation to the recent events in this geographical area. As if all that matters is the pure joy of still being able to remember and sing the lyrics of the songs together.

As a consequence of being produced and mostly displayed outside the geo-historical context of its subject, There Far Away subsequently developed into a video installation. In the installation, the main video, presented as a video projection, is followed by a second video screened on a small TV monitor—a sort of epilogue in which the artist herself speaks in front of the camera during her residency in London. Through a series of brief and fragmented facts that introduce the viewer to the geo-historical background of the scene in the main video, she attempts to create a deeper and emotionally more complex access to the work’s less obvious and less readily perceived context