Liza (Donja Vrba, Croatia), 2006, copyright and courtesy the artist

Margareta Kern's current solo exhibition of work at the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, Bath, Clothes for Death form part of a research based visual art project by the artist documenting women in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina who prepare clothes in which they wish to be buried.

Art Rabbit: Margareta I first came across your work when you exhibited a previous project 'Graduation Dresses,' which marked the progression from teenager to woman, your new series looks at the final stages of life and is a response to a tradition in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina of women preparing clothes for their own burial. You were born in Croatia and have traveled back there for this series of work, were you previously aware of the ritual?

Margareta Kern: It was while filming in my mother’s flat (where she runs a small made-to-measure business) that one of her customers proclaimed rather proudly that her mother, while she was alive, traveled all the way to Zagreb to get a special outfit with a turban made in which she wanted to be buried in. This sentence made a physical presence in my body and I couldn’t get rid of it until I started to research it further. Most of the people I spoke to were not aware of the ritual, were slightly baffled by it (I guess like I was) and the fact that it has not been a formalized tradition, all packaged, preserved and mythologized in a Museum, was what drew me to conduct my own (re)search. Most of the women I photographed live in rural areas, where this custom has been kept ‘alive’ by some of them.

AR: It is an incredibly personal and privileged position to be in, first to have been shown these clothes and then being invited to photograph the women with them. Did you find it affected the sorts of photographs you took?

MK: I think the added challenge of this custom being so personal, hence not knowing who has prepared their clothes for death and who is willing to share it with me, made it more exciting but also more unnerving.
The awareness of my complex position with its own burdens and privileges has definitely affected how I went about photographing. I met the women predominantly through personal contacts, through people that trust me and in turn I was given the trust by the women I photographed. With that trust comes responsibility, and certain considerations, which are necessary when working so intimately with people and including them in the process of art making.

I’ve experimented with different approaches, for example photographing the clothing and the women separately, but in the end I decided to include the clothing, the women and their personal spaces all in one frame. By photographing them at their eye level, looking directly at the camera, I wanted there to be no ambiguity that they are aware of the fact that they are being photographed. It also struck as a more ‘honest’ way (on my part) of negotiating ethics with aesthetics.

AR: Sometimes the women look uncertain other times they look resentful, though you always achieve respectfulness in the images, a kind a deferential distance, were their any instances when you were privy to the women’s feelings towards their impending death beyond the expressions on their face and their body language?

MK: I am glad that this respectfulness is visible, and I like the term deferential distance. Distance is an interesting concept, as throughout the project I kept thinking that I am a kind of a stranger, intruder, yet sometimes we open up more to strangers, and their transience gives us courage to be ourselves. It’s as if a certain distance is an important ingredient to intimacy.

Before taking photographs, I filmed an interview with each person, and in these interviews I tried to gauge their relationship to clothing and through that their relationship to death. But, that was quite challenging as the majority of women were speaking very much in practical terms about their preparation. Still, I had a few amazing conversations, when the women were so direct in the way they addressed death that I was quite shaken up.
And at the same time, how much their face expressions do reflect their relationship to death, to me, or to what happened prior to that moment will never be known.

AR: Why are there no men in the photographs; is it only women who prepare clothes for their death?

MK: Well, after working with young women on the Graduation Dresses project, I became more interested in how women construct their identity. So, when I started researching Clothes for Death, I was interested to find out how older women deal with the issue of aging, how their identities are shaped. But I still remained open to including men…However during my first journey I came across only women, who have prepared the clothes for death for themselves and those whose husbands were alive had prepared his clothing too. That was interesting to discover, the position these women took was very much of authority and power, albeit in the domestic domain. Hence, I decided to focus only on the women, as historically (and especially in the Western Balkans) they have been under and misrepresented in public spaces (although images of older women are rare in the public realm here in the UK too).

AR: I am interested in how one goes about selecting clothes for your death. Were their similarities that you noticed between the selected clothes?

MK: Yes, I noticed many similarities; the most pervading one was the petticoat. Most of the women had them in their death attire. Mara, said to me that when they came into fashion, she bought one especially for her clothes for death and took the old garment out (which I think were the long cotton knickers). Kata, in the same village (where my grandparents come from) had hers perfectly folded in the same box she bought it in, never worn.
In Banjice, a small village on the border between Bosnia and Serbia, all of the women I photographed had a red thread, which was to be used for ‘drawing’ a cross on their bodies when they die. I also noticed this red thread in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but not in Croatia.

AR: A number of the rooms in which the women have selected to be photograph are decorated with religious imagery and crucifixes. What are the religious connotations, if any, in the tradition?

MK: I think the tradition is predominantly Christian, stemming from the custom of wearing ones Sunday’s best to the church. It is also probably influenced by the open casket funerals, which are still customary in some parts of SouthEast Europe. Being seen in a good suit or a dress, is connected to ones social status, hence an important part of the funerary preparation and procession.

I should also clarify that Christian includes the Catholic and the Orthodox religions, both of which are prevalent in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.

I also photographed one Muslim woman - Rukija, and this photograph in a way reflect the difference in the custom – she is sitting next to a plastic bag in which a cover used for covering the body during the funeral procession, is wrapped. In Islam the tradition is to wrap dead person’s body into white sheets, with no specific clothing. In my conversation with an Imam, he explained that this because everybody is equal in death. I was also told that before the war I might have come across more Muslim women who have prepared their death attire, but now the preparation is mostly done at mosques, where also the bathing ceremony takes place.

AR: These women’s lives have been shaped by historical and political turbulence, your work has often investigated spaces of displacement and dispersion, do you see this series of photographs within this context?

MK: Through this project I became more and more curious about the effect various historical and political regimes have had on the women in the Western Balkans. Most of the women that took part in the project have lived through at least 3 different political and economic systems. First it was the Kingdom of Serbs, Slovenes and Croats, then it was the socialist Yugoslavia and now a more nationalist, post-socialist form of capitalism is in place. So, in a way my interest in the ways that the social and political forces influence our personal lives, extends to this project.
And even though I didn’t set out to directly to include the effect the recent civil war has had on the women, I knew that it is unavoidable. Bosiljka, who lives on the outskirts of Banja Luka, Bosnia (the town I grew up in) came there as a refugee in 1995. She told me that the first thing she packed was her clothes for death, giving them to her son, as they were packing to leave. Her life has been completely changed by the war, and yet it was interesting that she held on to this ritual, perhaps as a way of saving her previous way of living and her identity.

AR: Living and working in London you are an artist in a different culture to that which you were born, I suspect that the work acts as an investigation into the culture you left. Are you working on a new series of work that has similar concerns? What’s next?

MK: Yes, part of what these projects do is to provide me with a space and a point from which to investigate the culture I left behind quite abruptly at the start of the civil war in Bosnia. But it’s been an odd kind of timing: when I started to feel at home in London, I began to travel more back to Bosnia and Croatia, and a completely new process opened up for me that offered me the kind of multi layering and the combination of the personal and social that I have been looking for. I think this process will continue as several projects I have in mind combine geographically both the UK and Bosnia and thematically continue my concerns.

I will be bringing my earlier work ‘Graduation Dresses’ and ‘Clothes for Death’ together in a touring exhibition called ‘Clothes for Living and Dying’, starting with a show in Zagreb, Croatia (May 2008) and continue touring the UK with the first showing at Margaret Harvey Gallery, St Albans.