Maja Ruznic, Name of the Voice

Hales is delighted to announce Name of the Voice, a solo exhibition of works by Maja Ruznic (b. 1983 Bosnia & Hercegovina). Her first solo exhibition with the gallery comes after her inclusion in Hales New York’s group exhibition, The Moon Seemed Lost.

The exhibition at Hales London takes its title from the trial of Joan of Arc as described by writer Ann Carson in her essay Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, found in her 2016 chapbook, Float. The excerpt refers to a scene where the judges are pressing Joan of Arc to define the voices that guide her as singular or plural, she responds: “The light comes in the name of the voice.” Ruznic likens her painting process to Joan of Arc’s relationship to the ‘voice’ and the ‘light’ – hinting at a guiding presence in her paintings. This presence echoes throughout the works in this exhibition, in the figures that emerge in the paint, radiating in and out of a nebulous light.

In this new body of work, Ruznic turns towards domesticity, family life and familial relationships. Ruznic was pregnant whilst making the paintings and was thinking about the life she was growing: ‘I wondered what my childhood experience of being a refugee will mean to my daughter – if anything at all.’ (Ruznic, 2020) Through research, Ruznic discovered that if a pregnant mother is experiencing stress and trauma, she will pass those afflictive emotions to her child. It is this poignant questioning that formed the starting point for this new direction in her paintings.

Ruznic deftly weaves themes of trauma and suffering with mythology and healing, softening the darker subject matter in her work. This softening is then applied to the process of painting, where blurring and allowing shapes to bleed into one another symbolically destabilizes borders. Playing with ambiguity, the paintings lie on the threshold of form, which Ruznic compares to a thought or a feeling that precedes language.

Name of the Voice reflects Ruznic’s diasporic experience – as she attempts to collect the scattered fragments of her memory, she makes scumbled marks on the canvas. In paintings of muted hues and soft edges Ruznic creates a strong sense of the power of memory – its strong hold over her but its elusion to being fully captured.