In addition to the unique time travel through the 20th century, Dejana’s concept “Happy Family’’ deals with the issue of family happiness.
By frozen scenes in the frame of carefully formed photo-arrangement, the artist focuses on the power of a document, dramaturgy and direction that underlines sentimentality and bizarre details, in order to alert and relativise our idea on the borderline between truths and lies, possible and impossible, personal and common.
Separating the worlds of adults and children, she ‘’paints’’ the crucial segment of this artistic project – the parents disguised, simulating (joint) happiness, and the child with the doll with prominently serious and sad expression on her face.
Within the framework of this detailed aesthetic and ethical review, the artist reconstructs every decade in terms of set design and costume design, almost obsessively in detail, placing the three actors in the settings recognizable as ‘’commonplaces’’ for many generations of ex-Yugoslavia.
Self/ironically and provocatively, she points to the social and civilization codes present in the phenomenon of personal and/or family happiness.