Teva Cosic Embraces Her Origins With a Project That Reflects on Identity and Displacement

An old family ritual, a faded photograph, a grandmother's recipe. For the Australian artist, each trace and gesture of her Croatian heritage becomes a valuable marker on the map of her personal identity.

Puno Puno, Lacu Noć (meaning lots and lots, goodnight) extended from a desire to reconnect to my Croatian heritage after the death of my grandmother in 2020. From the perspective of a third-generation Croatian the project broadly explores how personal and collective narratives of migration, identity and belonging are entangled and embedded within nostalgia. The work speculates on where culture lies as it attempts to both locate a sense of connection whilst also reconciling feelings of my own displacement through the creative act. The photographic encounters and other visual investigations that make up the project become points on a map that constellates my own narratives with those of the broader Croatian community and aim to further contextualise inter-generational experiences of migration within the contemporary Australian landscape. 

Words and pictures by Teva Cosic

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Teva Cosic (b.1994) is an artist living and working between Naarm/Melbourne and Gimuy/Cairns whose work explores ideas around memory, loss and place. Influenced by her cross-cultural (Swedish/Croatian) background, her current practice and research navigates inter-generational experiences of migration, feelings of cultural displacement and the role of nostalgia in maintaining connections to our past. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum.

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.