Maja Šofranac
Artist
She completed her undergraduate and master's studies in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She studied in France, was on residential art residencies in Europe and America. She has had several solo and group exhibitions in Montenegro and abroad. She is the winner of the annual awards for drawing and painting of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, the award of the Herceg Novi Winter Salon and the ULUCG award for the best exhibition for 2018. She lives and works in Podgorica and Cetinje.
Single woman
The work Single woman intends to point to a woman as an independent, free, equal and self-realized human being who can and should exist as such and without layers of socially imposed and gender roles which, according to traditional Montenegrin beliefs, only make a woman worthy of existence.
The cross-section of an airplane engine that appears as a video projection at work symbolizes the imposed patterns of behavior as the demands of an unconscious environment. By adopting the type of personality offered by cultural patterns, the modern woman and the modern man become automated individuals who lose their personal identity and drown it in a collective identity. The desire for inner freedom can be suppressed, it can disappear from the consciousness of the individual; but even then it does not cease to exist as a possibility.
The intention of work Single woman is to activate precisely those repressed and unconscious personality structures, whose coming to the surface and awareness would open up the possibility of re-examining life decisions that have suppressed a person's authentic identity.
