Zoran Dobric + Stephen Severn

London College of Fashion, 2025

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​​Corporeal Flux is a practice-based research project that explores the refugee experience and healing through collaborative creative practice. The installation includes wearable art by Zoran Dobric and suspended photographic prints of the piece by Stephen Severn. The garment is informed by Dobric’s refugee experience when he fled the war in the former Yugoslavia. Dobric expresses these disturbing memories through hand-painted abstracted morphing bodies that represent physical and cultural displacement. The photographs by Severn present these memories and experiences as a fluid search for self- realization through community.

 

The combined work in this installation highlights the power of collaborative practice in building new narratives from traumatic experiences. The three hanging pieces in the installation show an unending progression from displacement to healing as the elements morph between artefact, image, and opacity. This emphasizes the corporeality of the body in space: its placement or displacement in communities of belonging or in geographies of loss. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (2024), there are currently over 117.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, 29.4 million of which are refugees. The Corporeal Flux installation engages the refugee experience of continually forming futures of care and healing through kinship and collaborative creative practice.