HEARTLESS    /    FATHERLAND    /    BEZIMENA    /    TAROT

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Bezimena

Fantagraphics, 2019

Bunjevac’s art resembles woodcuts or intaglio. There’s an implacability to every dot and line. She deliberately creates stagey tableaux, emulating the drawings in John Willie’s 1940s-50s fetish magazine Bizarre. The frozen pictures also suggest carefully posed selfies: They’re perfect simulacra of perfection. — Etelka Lehoczky, NPR

In her masterfully lush, stippled technique, Bunjevac conjures mesmerizing dreamscapes and eerie allusions to the Greek myth of Artemis and Siproites. Refusing to shy away from the morally grotesque, Bezimena seeks to discover what compels people to commit acts of evil. — CBC Books

I don’t know that Bezimena can be read clearly through the political criteria that is the go-to these days. It demands standards for intellectual intake that are less demanding of narrow definitions for art, that accept that sometimes art has to go uncomfortable places and view things from disturbing vantage points to get to the root of what’s important about the subject. It requires a reader to hand over the reins to the work, to refrain from imposing what is considered the right way to approach things and let the work reveal that in this universe, some things are not right. You can change yourself, but the universe is less easy because you can’t change what you are obscured from seeing. The universe lies beyond your own limitations, imperceptible from where you are positioned, and coming to that understanding usually involves a lot of very difficult moments with art. — John Seven, The Beat

For queries, please contact Alessandra Sternfeld of AM Books. Please note, some of the visuals and narratives contained in Bezimena are sexually explicit.

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