Marijana Zebeljan: In her own words – being her own – an interview by Tanja Beljanski

Marijanaze

Mazeb Open minded and fearless. Marijana spent her childhood in magic Kotor, medieval city located at the Adriatic Sea, along one of Montenegro's most beautiful bays. Her parents were devoted to the arts, so it was not that difficult to foresee the path of her development.

Marijana is an original.

Since her student days, this multimedia artist has created continuously. She has been exploring and experimenting through diverse media. Primarily painting is most important to her she has also given new life through applicable moving panels by making  belts, necklaces, T-shirts…  "It's a little, mobile gallery for the  person wearing it," says Marjana.  She makes collages, records videos and creates short animated cartoons.
Marijana travels a lot, but she is based in Kotor. Her work has been awarder and exhibited in Rome, Ljubljana, London, St. Petersburg, Leipzig, Edinburgh, Vienna, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Kotor…
At the beginning of this year, she had a belt exhibition in London, at Brick Lane. The French magazine CLAM and New York Art Magazine for Modern Art have written about Marijana and her art. 
Her dedication and devotion is something  to be admired as well as her endless sacrifice to truth.

T.B: Painting – basic and primary?
M.Z: As my father is also painter, from my childhood I inhaled the smell of turpentine and the colors that were captured by the frames on the blue walls of our room. However, I did not dare to think of it as the way I would follow one day.

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Tripk

T.B: Video work: Sea. How do you see it?
M.Z: Blue. I remember that somebody once said that the most beautiful word in English is "blue" because you can really see blue while you pronounce it. Concretely, video works I have made are the series of animations named "Each day of April". I was capable of sitting in the rain, with my camera turned to the sea, waiting for an extremely heavy rainfall and recording frenetically the game between the water drops and the water of the sea surface. I would mostly come home soaked to the skin. Of course, after all these experiments, my camera would not work, but there was another one, old just enough it should be.

T.B: Animated cartoon: in what way do you do? Where do you show them?
M.Z: It was a long time ago that I found, I think, on the Internet, some works of the artist whose name, unfortunately, I cannot remember, I was completely fascinated by the works I saw…
I have been working with an old camera, not that good, but good enough to make two thousand good quality pictures. On these pictures, I spin and behave like a clown or ask someone to do it for me.
I show them at the festivals where clowning became officially the art. Joking aside, at the last Festival of Experimental Art in Russia, I introduced myself with a short animated cartoon "Fear". A movement that presume to be an emotion, caught in a moment that does not stop.

T.B: Trash and decaying, trash collecting and creating something new of it – is it a connection with the feelings aroused by the disintegration of your country?
M.Z: Well… it is possible. I have never thought about this in that way, but it is possible that, somewhere, deeply down, in the "subconscious part of subconsciousness", there is such kind of connection, if something like that exists at all. It is true that I develop a strong feeling about things around me. It is hard to throw something away, even it is in its last phase of decaying. I live in belief that things around me have energy; the energy of something they belonged to.
I have made more than a thousand of small installations, necklaces, rings… from the things found by the road – the most incredible things that one can find at the refuse dump.

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T.B: You have transformed a part of your own art into clothes wishing to make "a small mobile gallery". What is next?
M.Z: When I started making "neck installations", I did not have any inkling of taking up them so long. My necklaces are large. One day I made necklace that could not be necklace any longer because it took megalomanic dimension. Then, I passed to belts. Now, when I am making belts, I can see that I am going to have the same problem because I am making larger and larger pieces. I just cannot stop. As far as my "small mobile gallery" is concerned, yet that is exactly what I wanted: to give life to my pictures by giving them sculptural form that will become portable at one moment. That is my primary motivation, because space is really one of my biggest problems. I would like to try everything and the most, I would like to have a factory! A huge workshop and someone who would keep all the tools like a new pin. On the other hand, yet tomorrow, I could not find my little pincers! Well, than we could talk of what to do further, what is next. Like this, the only thing that is certain is the existence of my pictures and my small portable installations.

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Ogrlica4marijana

T.B: What hurts most?
M.Z: A man sitting on the bench alone. Passing away of Sonja Savi?. Something that has nothing to do with culture. Stupidity. Primitivism. It hurts me a lot for not having my own piano, flat, terrace. Each song by Bulat Okutzhava hurts me, too. It hurts that one dog had gone. The fact that one country does not exist any more hurts me a lot… Rain hurts me as well as the time passing. Sinking into oblivion also hurts me much. A man hurts me, the man who loves animals very much and has no place where to sleep.
It seems that I really like being hurt?!

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Zebeljan.Marijana.Portfolio.5.

T.B: What makes you happy?
M.Z: I am happy whenever I have a chance to buy the work of another artist. Colors, pancakes, strawberries and the summer make me happy as well as Philip Pettit and Ra

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