GALLERY 106 is delighted to announce first solo show of performance artist Biljana Golubovic and fine-art photographer Dragan Dragin, to be held at the Freud Museum, London. On the night of the exhibition the museum will be open to the public to enjoy while artists will try to evoke and recreate the feeling of home. For four hours the museum will become a home to its audience.

Peeling Away: Home Memories explores the tender relationship between body and being, between house and home. Through documentary, photography, film, diary entries, and interviews this exhibition explores the entwinement of material and immaterial, a relationship exposed particularly during processes of habitat decay and disintegration. As a home is demolished, it looks as if the memories of its inhabitants are too, the identity of whom is gradually peeled from the walls into insignificance.

In the autumn of 2008, the Art Nouveau house in Malá Strana, Prague is sold to become a hotel. Its interior gutted, the house is gradually and permanently wiped of any trace of its former life as a home of 18 years. In response to their eviction, Biljana and Dragan begin to record the emotional and physical details of their journey from residents in their own home to squatters in a half-demolished house. Compelled by these recordings and changes, they begin a multimedia project which captures the process of removing traces of human existence and regressing a home back into a house.

A home is an intricate collage of the past and present. Once it is lost, it is human nature to repeat the ritual: to apply the layers of touch, presence and humanity to a new space and call it home. This cycle is at its most habitual in the modern age of crises, immigration and deprivation. What dies in this process, and remains living, is left to be explored.

Biljana Golubovic and Dragan Dragin have worked together for the past 25 years and have founded Summer Academy for performing arts BARTcamp, in Montenegro. Their artwork stems from field experiences in rural former Yugoslavia during the years of civil war crises. Drawing from these experiences, their collective work is situated around the hidden aspects of personal memory, communal memory, and memory of the landscape in relation with rituals of transition. Their explorations in multimedia find the points of intersection between cultures and utilise these to create art which finds the true, human meaning of ‘home’.

Dragan Dragin is a photographer and video maker. He studied photography at Film and TV School at Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In his work he explores relations between human body and space in different social and cultural conditions like transition rituals, landscape, ecology disaster or home and migration. His photo collections include Landscape as a Fate, Planet of Shepherds and Home project. Dragan’s work has been presented at numerous group and individual exhibitions in countries such as Belgium, Italy, Poland, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Serbia, South Korea and many more. His work is featured in private and public collections including Prague National Gallery, Duncan Foundation Prague and Tanz Museum in Cologne, Germany. He won an award for his portfolio “Diary of Silence” at Festival Les Rencontres de la Photography International in Arles, Luskaček and Famu Fest in Czech Republic.

Biljana Golubović (PhD) is a performance artist, teacher and video maker. She holds an MA from The University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy department of Fine Art History and a PhD in Directing and Dramaturgy from the University of Prague, where she also lectured theatre anthropology. Her theatre performances and community-based art projects have involved artists, mental hospital patients, asylum seekers, and other groups in Czech Republic, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Germany, Poland, Montenegro, and Serbia. Biljana won the Czech Dance Platform 2017 award for the dramaturgy and directing of ‘Swish’.