Nika Autor enters the field of documentary intervention through the form of film essay that penetrates, with a political and intimate tone, the spaces of forests, rivers and disused, forgotten railway lines along the borders. Her forests are red; the razor wire aggressively winds through them, shedding blood. In these forests, dreams are dying, lives are extinguished, and stories of "invisible" travellers whose traces are already being lost under fallen autumn leaves are disappearing. What they leave behind are the worn-out, forgotten and lost shoes, quietly summarizing refugee lives into the reality of the lost, the erased, the anonymous and unheard. During their journey, some were carried away by a river, and others caught, beaten and deported by police. But sometimes a footage remains behind, a visual fragment of a journey in the undercarriage of a train, in which anonymous trainers are trying to keep a firm grasp above the speeding rails. 

Nevertheless, the migrants, refugees and exploited construction workers captured through Nika Autor’s lens are not just numbers. They are not a dehumanized, anonymous mass of people that the (TV) media reduce them to. 

The artist enters their space intimately, observationally, her camera consciously recording stories that usually tend to stay outside our field of vision. Hidaya Alsisi, Etaf Alburai, Dana Mikawi, Nadia Hakki, Adrohman Begum, Ahmed Kawsar, Hussein Tahsan, Zied Abdellaoui, Armin Salihović, Esad Kapić. None of them is just a victim. They are people with specific desires, goals and visions; Each with their own identity, face and name. But what makes Autor’s oeuvre truly subversive is the fact that everyone speaks to her from their own perspective, without intermediaries in the form of intellectual authorities; activists, politicians, theorists.

She is interested in editing images that challenge the established division of fiction and documentarism, inquire into the meaning of truth and objectivity, and occasionally convey the content in a fragmented, broken and incomplete way. Her films ask more questions than they give answers, challenging the viewer to try to make sense of a fragment or a momentary lack of image. To direct their gaze at things they would not normally gaze at, and shatter any prejudices and preconceptions they might have; just as Razglednice (Postcards), a re-edited archival footage, offers a different representation of migrants, victimized and criminalized along the Balkan route. After all, the forest areas captured through Nika Autor’s lens have never been just a place of biodiversity, of an idyllic and serene reconnection with the natural environment. These areas are fraught with political conflicts and bear witness to repression, but there are poor prospects for the lives of aliens even outside these forests, V deželi medvedov (In the Land of Bears). Therefore, they find the greatest approximation to a safe haven in one of the more personal newsreels in which the filmmaker’s aunt, the “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) Metka Autor, comes into focus, using cooking recipes and chapters to determine contact points between her own immigrant experience and the situation of today's travellers. 

The film oeuvre of Nika Autor is primarily guided by an engaged inquiry into art in relation to history and current social issues; her works examine migration, labour rights and politics of memory. But her approach to the field of film is unconventional: she first studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana and obtained her PhD in Vienna. Continuing to work in multimedia, her artistic means of expression are film, video installation, photography, drawing and collage, as well as text – superimposed on film as subtitles – spilling over the soundtrack in Obzornik 670 (Newsreel 670). Over the last decade, Autor has been part of the informal collective Obzorniška Fronta (Newsreel Front). The filmmaker would like to express particular thanks to its members Jošt Frank, Bojan Bajsić and Maja Lovrenov for their invaluable help in presenting this retrospective.

Veronika Zakonjšek