‘Nika Rukavina’

One thing that women are taught, from a young age, is how not to be something or not to do something. Things that we are told during our lifetime have a huge impact on the way we see and perceive ourselves, on our self-esteem and the way we interact with the world around us. ‘Don’t be so emotional’ is a sentence that was repeated to the Croatian artist Nika Rukavina throughout her childhood and which had a great deal of impact on her behaviour and inability to deal with emotions.

During her performance at Bozar she will carve the sentence in stone to replicate the pain that was inflicted on her by those words and then by breaking the stone she liberates herself from past traumas. In a second part of the performance visitors are invited to choose their own sentence, write it on stone and break it in order to experience their own symbolic liberation.