https://www.artemiziafoundation.org/mural-labyrinth

https://www.artemiziafoundation.org/art - in Bisbee, Arizona, USA

https://www.artsteps.com/view/645d3688d6ae75637ef4293d

 

 💥"From Babylon To Uranus: Blood Moon Goddess" - my first solo international planetary exhibition, consisting of photography (self-portraits) and poems. Next three ones will be made of glitch art, videos and drawings/illustrations. 👄

 

 With this concept, I describe the most stigmatized mental disorder on the planet: borderline personality disorder. It is characterized by a vague self-image and chameleon-like soul, unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, large amplitudes in mood (from euphoria to depression and back at lightning speed), self-destructiveness and impulsiveness (drinking and drug use, fast driving, self-injury, shopping addiction). We deal a lot with racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, but we actively avoid talking about our loathing, fearing and distancing from physical and especially psychological aberrations, and the latter are often demonized and exaggerated, overly dramatically depicted in films and pop-culture. Borderline is the other side of narcissism, the black death of modern society, that fragile, sad and misunderstood phantom who feels too much and too intensely in a world where it is imperative to be an arrogant and greedy iceberg. Borderline is also characterized by a fragmented self and is very similar to the symptom of multiple personalities, so I present it through a neon colorful array of my fluid identities in eternal transformation. I play with otherness by examining and exploring different, multiplied identities that are viscous, in eternal metamorphoses, and I realized that I am queer, i.e. that Other, radically different, displaced, strange, exaggerated, theatrical, hysterical, non-normative, playful and “crazy”. My obsession with dark goddesses is also fiercely present from the beginning. I channel mythological creatures that are part of that dark pandemonium, dangerous and seductive mistresses of love, death, night, chaos, magic, the occult and transformation, and my photo sessions themselves are a kind of invocations and pagan rituals, because through them I come into contact with my ancestors. In doing so, I challenge the historical view of female sexuality as dangerous, unpredictable, capricious, shrouded in a veil of mystery, all-consuming and fatal. Dark goddesses (primarily the primordial rebel Lilith and the sorceress Hecate, as well as succubi, vampires, lamias and sirens), simultaneously represent the ultimate power and strength with which I want to reach my inner, immanent goddess again, but also the destructiveness of illness and trauma, where they play the role of a demon or nemesis that persecutes me, therefore, I persecute myself and thus I myself become diabolical. I am simultaneously a walking phallus and a huge, gaping, hallucinatory wound, displaying the tango of my impudence and bleeding fragility and fear. BPD used to be understood as hysteria, and before that, manifestations of mental illness or deviations from the norm were interpreted as demonic possession, vile marionette shadowplay of the devil, and led to the persecution and burning of "witches". Therefore, there is an erotic and sexual element (because sexuality is an elementary part of my identity, but also sex as a trauma) that I permeate with the aromas of violence, someone else's physio-psychological that I introjected inside and directed towards myself in the form of self-destructiveness, and through this interweaving eroticism becomes provocative, predatory, vengeful, devouring, punishing like Medea or petrifying like Medusa – and I describe it as perverse sexuality and paraphilias, pervading pleasure and pain. Hypersexualization is another symptom of trauma. I try to untangle the ball and knot of my turbulence and ambivalence in the performance through extravagant and extreme or familiar but distorted body states, where I use erotic language and the language of transgression to bring to the surface emotional turmoil, pain and the fact of trauma, which I transform into metaphorical exotic plants through a surreal and hallucinatory imaginary. I analyze neurodivergency, the feeling of otherness, otherness, displacement, marginalization and misunderstanding due to the taboos and stigmas with which psychological deviations from the norm are still covered, and the society of spectacles and all-consuming narcissism alienate what, pathetically speaking, is authentic or feels true, arising from the deepest personal abysses, essences and cores. I show these identity deformations and transformations by parading in an abundance of assortments, decorations, masks, prostheses, everything that emphasizes the theatrical bulkiness of thirst and desire. These prostheses and elongations serve the theater of cruelty that I present. There are also quirks, masquerades, hyperbolized presentation of one's own character and my alter-egos from cinematography and pop culture (mainly actresses). From them I create delirious parallel universes, and I realize their strangeness through surrealism, the grotesque, the carnivalesque quality of motifs and images, and I crush the reality of myself and hybrid characters, archetypes that acquire a futuristic dimension, and alien representations. They are a gap and a crack through which reality peers into the astral infinity and slips into the world of phantoms, ghosts, aliens, bizarre beasts and actresses who, instead of plastic surgery, go through digital malformations, in a kind of transhumanism. The intimate becomes completely robotized and handed over to technology that tailors something that I would describe as different cosmic laws. Reality schizophrenicaly sizzles, plays, and the characters I portray seem possessed. It is a fantasy world in which I sleepwalk and dive, in hyperrealistic nightmarish or opioid, altered states of consciousness through dystopian landscapes of the mind and spirit, trying to escape the horrors of the gloom and doom and the venomous, nuclear desolation of alienated, lonely self. On the sunnier part of the concept, there is an unbridled, unhinged witch in me that balances those glitter tears out, a great pagan sorceress, drawing from the Balkan roots, and reminding of shamanism, divination and magic rituals. I dance like a walking heresy, spiting Spanish inquisition, unbothered and unbridled, in crazy, hysterical but wavy-soft meanders, in a fire that is so strong inside that erects from around like phalluses. Those candles are organs in a sacred cathedral of Nature. I´m blind to the ones that search for silencing or punishment of rebels, seducing with my dance only, in redness like red shoes of Oz, in wizardry and musk scents of streams that connect me with my pagan ancestors. Those streams are as deep as ocean undercurrents, and as undestroyable as arteries and veins of a woman that is free and in possession of her own body, mind and spirit, but is called mad and insane for it.

 

 https://petrabrnardic.blogspot.com/2023/03/blog-post.html

 

                                                
                     

Siren Sadness (2012)

Black Siren (2014)

Siren Song (2019)

 

My short experimental animated movie "Diamond Hurricane" on Future Vision Film Festival 2022 (in Tokyo, Amsterdam, online and on SALTO TV) - PRESS, category: STYLISH

 

http://futurevisionfestival.fayheady.com/fvf-2022/FutureVisionZine2022-OnlineVersion.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2g7lwOMSdQDYGCPqFZ9mlmBm_rZKu397fG4ukOo-vIyO83Z4DgfzNgX7o 

 https://temporaryartreview.com/deep-trash-in-the-underworld-at-bethnal-green-mens-working-club/?fbclid=IwAR3pSRU8xlVoc0xC_C35MVC7sf6qGwZTLCfEx8K9JLCap8z7tQm7_cywiY0

 

 "Petra Brnardic’s psychedelic alien B-horror tentacular trans-species feminist digital collages were a world of words in themselves. In particular, Blooming (2014) was a floral bouquet bursting with snakes with a woman’s legs splayed wide open in some horrifically vulnerable position, each foot balanced on a skull. Yet there was no head attached to the woman; the woman is her body and only that. This piece played with the tradition of the memento mori, the Christian concept of humility by being reminded about one’s own mortality, especially seen in still life paintings using the symbology of skulls and clocks and dying fruit, but this combination of fantastical elements was also a jarring engagement with occult practices and the subjectification of the female body in ritual, of pain and pleasure and sacrifice, ultimately allowing the female form to rise to the status of a goddess, which her other digital collages also evoke. "

 

 "Succubi is a short poetic movie with experimental free-style dance. I recorded myself doing improvised choreography on the terrace of the seaside house, late at night, while everyone was asleep. The setting was quiet, only song of crickets lacing the silence of the air. I represent a ghost, a phantom-like apparition, surreal creature that is succubus, female who haunts and attacks men in their sleep. Or it could be a dream sequence per se, where I invocate strange, otherwordly forces and act out my inner energy and psychological impulses. It is a seduction in the heat of the night, but paradoxically cool, aloof and distant. I wanted to paint poetic image, and my breathing is essential part of it."

http://deptfordcinema.org/dcathome-posts/darkroom-exp

Fever / Petra Brnardic / Croatia 2015 / 5’11

"This brutal, macabre collage piece merges psychedelics with a camp horror aesthetic to explore ideas around the historically perceived danger of female sexuality." - by Darkroom Film Festival, London, UK.

 

 

 "This movie is a sort of visual poetry, made as a collage, with non-linear and associative structure. I speak about my own melancholy, yearning and desire, and I depict images and scenes of a nostalgic paradise, arcadia and utopia which are mixed with gruesome and anxious, through the relation between a man and a woman. Images are reminiscences of a seaside summer vacation which stirred deep emotions in me. At the same time I show interpersonal connection, sensuality and tenderness, opposed with feelings of loneliness and fears triggered by it."

 „Virus“ is short experimental movie about terror of beauty and positioning on masks, imposed by society expectations, that are actually our personas, hiding our true selves. The woman (myself) repetitively puts on and scraps off her make-up, in feverish ritual, in search for identity. It could be shamanic masquerade, glittery face of a clown or seductive redness, but at the end it all comes down to suffocating in vicious circle of necessity od acting and putting on the show for the predatory public view. Or, to self-cannibalism."

 "Ghost Bride is a movie that presents a bit eerie and sinister, yet at the same time ethereal and dreamy dance of the bride that passed away, in a romantic tone, which turns a form of a ghost or phantomic apparition that obsessively hunts her groom, like a pale vampire, returning to his visions, dreams and memories. Cold weapon as a brutal detail is present because the groom is haunted by a sense of guilt related to unknown and mysterious circumstances of bride´s death, which adds the element of tension and suspense. Ceremonial sounds of church bells in the beginning are followed by idyllic spring bird chirping, but soon they gain much ominous tone with the appearance of the whirlwind of wuthering heights od this tragic romance. It is an archetypal story told in a contemporary manner."

 

 "This is a short experimental movie with poetic freestyle dance. It is about the afterlife of the White and Black Swan finally merged together in one entity. It is a celebration of a fusion and integration of light and dark fragments of the soul, of angelic and demonic dimensions, an exercise in ominous beauty of moodiness and euphoria (as in manic depression), of obscure sensuality and high-pitched elevation of the soul, sojourning fluidly in the body temple and transcending it at the same time. Echoes of movement are mirroring multiple and complex layers of a psyche in a feverish exorcism."

 "Mermaid Song represents an emotional landscape and abysmal agony of a mermaid from the ocean imprisoned and enslaved in a bathtub, as a symbol of isolation, alienation and entrapment. Bath resembles the pool of blood that flows out of every pore of siren´s haunted psychological catacombs, leaking bubbly archipelagos of shattered heart that crystallize and sublimate themselves through spoken poetry of a director and actor. The pain is masked in seduction, but both of them are deadly."

 

 "....All is bathed in alien-like disco underground ambience, merged with cosmos surroundings and abstract neon spaces..." "...She takes the shapes from pagan goddesses to movie stars and deranged silverscreen divas, so the film is also about voyage of a woman through time and many female archetypes, like volcanic and frenzied shapeshifter..." "...a cocktail of retro bizzare monster aesthetic and futuristic escapism..." (excerpt)

This  is my first voyage to more linear narration, a mixture of suspense thriller, horror and film noir, with fragmented, associative structure and an accent on atmosphere and emotions. There is a premonition of something dangerous, dark and ominous happening. Everything slowly unravels through emotionally charged, both dreamy and nightmarish images and visual metaphors, and it all culminates with a woman, at first histerical then spiralling into madness, dancing on the razorblade of psychological black hole. She is being attacked and smothered by an eerie stranger or a convolution of her own psyche, some inner demon or nemesis that is haunting her, rising from the darkest depths of amygdala. A real person or a figment of her imagination/aspect of her psyche? It remains a mystery.

 

 

Nigredo (2005)

Red Room (2010)

Tempest (2011)

Bedazzled Castle (2013)

Fever (2015)

Virus (2016)

Glossolalia (2017)

Ghost Bride (2018)

Leviathan of Desire (2018)

Visitors (2018)

Satan´s Porcupine (2018)

Masquerade (2018)

Succubi (2019)

Electric Labyrinth (2019)

Tarantula (2020)

Bloodbath (2021)

Diamond Hurricane (2021)

Neon Viper/Possession (2021)

Midnight Orange (2021)

Mermaid Song (2021)

Echoes (2021)

The Black Swan Flaming Ocean (2022)

Vicious Orchids (2022)

Butterfly and Snake (2023)