“Vernacular Spectacular presents a myriad of imagined characters performed by Katarina Rankovic. Each video is unscripted and spontaneously improvised in front of the camera, using the accents, gestures and mannerisms she picks up from people she encounters, both real and fictional. Featuring videos made between 2012-2019, this is the first extensive exhibition of the series.

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Through this Frankenstein’s collage of character attributes, Katarina finds she is able to say things she doesn’t believe, or that wouldn’t occur to her using her own personality alone. By putting herself in another’s, non-existent shoes, she is able to experiment with beliefs and persuasion, like flexing a muscle. These beliefs are deeply personal, and of course, as a by-product, political, and in this way play with the magic and possible perversions of rhetoric. In presenting conflicting philosophical points of view strung together with tenuously plausible pseudo-arguments, together the works evidence the fluidity of conviction and identity construction, suggesting that there is a certain art in believing, and a certain art in deciding for oneself what is real.”

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Tension Fine Art

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9 August - 7 September 2019