↳ Exhibitions

Rene Matić at Arcadia Missa

August 28, 2021

Artist: Rene Matić

Exhibition title: flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do

Venue: Arcadia Missa, London, UK

Date: July 22 – September 3, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa

Arcadia Missa is pleased to present flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do, an exhibition of photographs by Rene Matić, coinciding with the launch of their eponymous book by Arcadia Missa Publications.

‘flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do’ is a love letter – written in images – bringing together photographs taken between 2018 and 2021. Although the photos were taken across England, theirs is not a love letter to this country or any other.

As Hannah Black notes in her introduction to the book, Matić’s rendering of London, and England more broadly, is anti-symbolic, “all drab brick and interior.”

Photographs of council estates, sea-side towns and political graffiti sit amongst portraits of the artist’s friends and family, unveiling a romantic celebration of an urban community that is both diverse and precarious. The framed photographs in the gallery all sit on one line, evoking a cityscape extending across the gallery walls.

In these scenes of everyday life, traditional markers of identity and nationhood are subverted, as the artist expresses their complicated relationship to British-ness, one that is full of anger and resentment but complicated by love. This sentiment is further expressed in the sound piece Fuckin’ Thank U, playing from two speakers at the centre of the gallery. Combining recordings of loved ones with pop cultural references that function as exemplifiers of conflicting notions of identity, from controversial rapper Azealia Banks to the artist’s reciting the patriotic hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country, the piece reads as the artist’s reverie, sitting between fiction and reality.

Rene Matić (b. 1997, Peterborough) lives and works in London. Through photography, painting, sculpture, film and textiles, their practice explores the immeasurable dimensions of Blackness. Working through the lens of personal experiences as a queer Black womxn living in the diaspora, Matić exposes the fated conflicts and contradictions that one encounters while navigating the world in a body like their own.