Poetry Expo 26
/ 13 February 2026
Corporeal Thresholds
Negotiating memory and gendered limits
Poetry Expo 2026
This work brings together translated poems and drawings as a poetic-visual exploration of growing up, bodily memory, and the fragile borders that shape identity. I am interested in how the body remembers experiences long before the mind is able to name them, and how skin, breath, and silence become archives of personal and collective histories. Through images of fragmentation and softness, I question the boundaries between inside and outside, self and world, past and present.
The project is rooted in a reflection on childhood and adolescence shaped by imposed gender stereotypes, expectations, and invisible limitations placed on the body. I explore how identity is conditioned through language, touch, and social codes, and how the body becomes a site of both resistance and vulnerability. How body is the first imposed space for us and our home/house is the second one. The idea of the “border” is central to the work, not only as a political or geographical line, but as a poetic and existential threshold. The sky, as one of the earliest human words for a limit, appears as a metaphor for unreachable freedom and imagined possibility, while also marking a distant boundary we are taught to accept.
By merging visual marks and poetic language, she attempts to create a space where memory, trauma, softness, and strength coexist. This work is an invitation to rethink where the body ends, where memory begins, and whether any true border can ever be fixed.
The project is part of the subtheme The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair.
Author
Sara Tanasković
Sara Tanasković is a poet and visual artist whose work explores the body, memory, and the quiet, fragile moments of life. Her poetry often comes from observing small, intimate experiences, tracing vulnerability, resilience, and the ways we repair ourselves. She is interested in how patriarchal and gendered expectations shape our bodies and identities, often in ways we barely notice, and how these imposed norms follow us from childhood into adulthood. Her work quietly questions these pressures while exploring the possibility of reclaiming agency, tenderness, and self-recognition.
Alongside her poetry, Sara works with drawing, textiles, wax, pollen, and mixed media, turning the textures of lived experience into visual form. This approach allows her to explore memory and the body in a tactile, sensory way, creating work that speaks both visually and verbally. Her art and poetry often share the same attention to detail, finding significance in small gestures, overlooked moments, and the everyday traces of care and repair.
Across all her work, Sara is drawn to the quiet negotiations of vulnerability and strength, the marks of lived experience on body and mind, and the ways we communicate care, attention and presence.
She has exhibited internationally and in Serbia, including the Thessaloniki Photography Center, Athens Gallery, Pavillion of Cvijeta Zuzorić, Museum of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade, the XVI International Biennale of Miniature. Her poetry collection is forthcoming.
