Jelena-Juresa---Mira---Reader.Pdf

Jelena Jureša

Mira, skica za portret — Mira, Study for a Portrait Salon Muzeja savremene umetnosti / Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art 16/04 – 12/06/2016 4 5 Sadržaj / Contents

Una Popović Knjiga o projektu — kao „skica za portret” 12

Branka Benčić Dvostruka ekspozicija — kolizija prošlosti i sadašnjosti 20

Jelena Jureša Aneta Stojnić Mira_prepiska 38

Kristel Stalpert Pismo 60

Sara Mendelson Okean, čudo, čudnovato, buntovno 92

Biografije 202 Una Popović The Exhibition Reader: a “Study for a Portrait” 106

Branka Benčić Double Exposure — A Collision of Past and Present 114

Jelena Jureša Aneta Stojnić Mira_correspondence 136

Christel Stalpaert The Letter 160

Sarah Mendelsohn Ocean, Marvel, Strange, Rebellious 190

Biographies 202 8 9 10 11 12

Una Popović

Knjiga o projektu — kao „skica za portret” 13

Knjiga pred nama posvećena je kritičkom sagledavanju jednog rada, dugogodišnjeg umetničkog projekta Jelene Jureše – Mira, skica za portret (2010–2014). Knjiga je organizovana i realizovana povodom istoi- mene izložbe u Salonu Muzeja savremene umetnosti u Beogradu, uoči koje se javila potreba za širom i podrobnijom analizom rada, kako na značenjskom, tako i na formalnom, likovnom nivou. Izložba u Salo- nu Muzeja savremene umetnosti podrazumevala je prvo samostalno i celovito prikazivanje rada u Beogradu i Srbiji. Prethodno, rad je bio predstavljen na samostalnim izložbama u Zagrebu, Puli i Gracu, a oče- kuje se krajem ove godine i na izložbi u Osijeku. Život projekta Mira, skica za portret čini se tek će se razvijati i formirati, samim tim dodatno obrazlagati i definisati, ali ovo je bila prilika da se započne, sada i ovde, promišljanje o strukturi rada, o upotrebi dokumenta, o prirodi sećanja i poziciji pogleda, o autorkinom sagledavanju fotografije koja zajedno s tekstom u formi naracije treba da stvori naznaku o identite- tu i ličnosti jedne žene.

Ovo je knjiga o Miri…, ali, uz nju, i o Jeleni.

Rad Mira, skica za portret predstavlja multimedijalan pseudobiograf- ski rad, koji teži da oslika život jedne realno postojeće ali anonimne žene Mire i njene porodice, od perioda pre njenog rođenja, pa do njene tragične smrti. (Mirin) Portret se struktuira zanimljivo jer istraživa- nje inicijalno kreće od potrebe za pričanjem priče. Kroz upoznavanje 14

društvenih okolnosti i privatne istorije jedne porodice, Mirinih predaka ali i intimnih zanimanja same Mire, dolazi se do saznanja o jednoj ličnosti, psihološkom portretu jedne žene.

Celovit format rada podrazumeva video (dva relativno duga filmska toka koja se prezentuju u vidu dvokanalne instalacije), fotografije i umetničku knjigu. Umetnička knjiga kao i film predstavlja kolaž, samo zbog prirode medija formira specifičniji i zagonetniji odnos iz- među slike i priče, odnosno fotografije i teksta. Svaki od ovih segme- nata može da deluje zasebno kao narativna celina, i u tome se, izme- đu ostalog, ogleda jedinstvenost Jurešinog rada i izložbenih postavki. Svaki segment je instalacija za sebe, a instalacija – narativ o pogledu, koji stremi ka sećanju. Intermedijalnost unutar postavke, spoj fotografije i filma, kao i kolažiranje građe unutar filma koja se sastoji od fotografija iz privatnih arhiva, recentnih snimaka predela i enetrije- ra, a kojoj se pridodaje naracija u trećem, pa zatim u drugom licu, podrazumeva konfrontiranje različitih pogleda i vizija sećanja koji su kontrastirali jedno prema drugom u ritmu performativnih sekvenci izabranog materijala. U svakom fragmentu izabranog materijala suge- risana je potpuna kontrola nad „pogledom u sećanju”, kako bi se uhva- tio i regenerisao Mirin prelamajući identitet u lebdećim ritmovima protoka vremena.

Rad teži da sprovede istorizaciju jedog vremenskog perioda (Drugi svetski rat i nakon toga), društvenih okolnosti unutar Jugoslavije, privatnog života jedne porodice, ali uz to, ili iz toga zapravo, on nastupa i može se definisati kao sociološko i psihološko istraživanje. To se ogleda unutar dva produkciona modela rada na projektu. Prvi, formal- ni – podrazumeva metod organizacije arhive i sučeljavanja s ulogom i primenom iste (autorkino sučeljavanje s arhivom u procesu rada i na- šeg radi promatranja priče s ciljem saznanja o nekome). Drugi, psiho- loški model – odnosi se na autorkinu ulogu; pored funkcije istraži- vača i arhivara umetnica sebi pridodaje i ulogu biografa koji snagom 15

želje da nešto proizvede, objasni, predstavi, istupa pred savremeni- cima. Jureša želi da se izbori za drugog, za onaj mali i „nevažan” ži- vot ali posredno konstrukcijom istog ona poentira i na šira društvena i politička pitanja. Mira… je rad koji se s jedne strane može čitati kao ideološki, a s druge strane kao intiman, kao „unutrašnji” i privatan. U oba slučaja, prepoznaje se misao o nestajanju i nestanku. Moguće je da je to ono što je autorku motivisalo i davalo joj snagu da istraživanje obavi s namerom da i slikovito dočara takozvani prustovski paradoks sećanja.

Prilikom prisećanja vezujemo se za događaje, fotografije, predmete, ali smeštamo svoja sećanja i za mesta i prostore. Zanimljiv je Jurešin istraživački pa i performativni akt obilaženja mesta (Bihać, Saraje- vo, Jasenovac itd). Poput „traveloga”, umetnica se upućuje na istorij- ska, zlokobna i traumatična mesta. Nastupa s ciljem da upozna i is- pita prošlost vlastite zemlje… u potrazi je za kulturnim pamćenjem. Ovde se misli na onaj segment kulturnog pamćenja koji nije mobilan, već imobilan – mora se putovati, moraju da se obiđu autentična mesta kako bi se ostvario neposredan pristup nekom istorijskom događaju. Proces direktnog mapiranja mesta upotpunio je kvalitet interpretacije istorijskih činjenica u radu i gradirao tenziju unutar pamćenja. Za razliku od prostora koji se stalno u odnosu na ljude i situacije menja i preoblikuje, i time mu je identitet nestalan i apstraktan, mesta na kojima se nešto dogodilo označena su i identifikovana. Mesta se vezuju za ljudske sudbine i iskustva, time postaju individualizovana imenima i specifičnim događajima. Proces Jurešinog istraživanja i sučelja- vanja s prirodom mesta i učitanim događajima unutar toposa može se definisati kao specifičan i karakterističan metod unutar gradnje portreta – izmaknutog subjekta. Jer upravo u nameri da se slikovito do- čara i objasni nečija priroda postaje jasno da se tumačenje lika, pa i izvesnog istorijskog događaja najubedljivije ostvaruje kada se oslanja na individualna sećanja i priče, a ne toliko na dokumentaciju i arhivu. Koliko god je korišćena realna arhiva, porodična fotografija u radu 16

Mira, skica za portret, ona je u odnosu na ostalu građu mnogo manje prisutna. Jureša, kao gorepomenuti istraživač i biograf, pokušava da oživi tragove koji su već mrtvi. Njih je moguće obnoviti samo na nivou individualnog, a ne na nivou dokumentovanog i „precizno” po da- tumima zabeleženog sećanja. Time se objašnjava prelaz na takozvani zaživotni arhiv. Individualno, „lično” sećanje posebno se potencira u drugom delu filma kroz naraciju u drugom licu, gde postajemo svesni da se sin obraća majci (Miri) – na nivou intimnog opisa, susrećemo se sa subjektivnim pamćenjem, koje se uvek kao takvo formira dvoja- kim procesom, procesom brisanja, odnosno zaborava, i procesom se- ćanja, odnosno obnavljanja. I, zapravo, na taj način se u radu formira (samo) skica Mirinog porteta – vezom između uspomena i osećanja. Rad Mira, skica za portret nema za cilj da ubedi posmatrača u istinitost, u kontekstu ličnosti ili istorijskog događaja (kako između ostalog u svom tekstu navodi i Kristel Stalpaert), već on nudi subjektivan opis, koji formalno kroz proces pričanja priče i građenja slike konstru- iše portret jednog vremena i jedne žene u fragmentima. Jer kada je nešto istinito, ono je ograničeno jednom realnošću , a kada nešto želi- mo da rekonstruišemo – istorija života izgleda nam rasparčana i isec- kana. Samu istinitost potrebno je da posmatrač pronađe, da se suoči sa svojom dozom osećanja, da preinači zaborav u sećanje, kako bi ne- što ili nekoga sačuvao od protoka vremena i sagledao kroz Miru – kao metaforu.

***

Kao što u projektu Mira, skica za portret sagledavanje ide od opšteg ka posebnom, ka detalju unutar veće celine, tako i tekstovi pred nama analiziraju i vezuju se za pojedine segmente unutar rada. Svaki od tekstova osim što predstavlja lični, autorski doživljaj rada, može se promatrati kao sugestija pogleda, način na koji možemo da čitamo i sagledamo Miru. 17

Izuzetno sadržajan i slojevit tekst Branke Benčić kreće od opisa postavke u prostoru. Analizom upotrebe medija fotografije i filma, i izvesnom remedijacijom koju umetnica koristi u radu, Benčićeva ula- zi u polje sagledavanja Jurešinog bavljenja prošlošću i interpretacije vremena. Kristel Stalpaert se u svom tekstu fokusira na opis nema- terijalnih elemenata u radu, kao što su odnos zvuka i tišine u filmu, odsustva i prisustva na fotografiji. Tekst Sare Mendelson razmatra etimologiju imena i značenja koje ime i imenovano nosi u odnosu na istorijski kontekst. Konačno, zanimljiva je i prepiska, „pisani razgo- vor” između Anete Stojnić i Jelene Jureše koji nas upoznaje s inici- jalnom namerom umetnice da rad realizuje, i uvodi u razmatranje istorijskog revizionizma unutar savremenih umetničkih praksi ali i sprovodi zanimljivu tezu o geneologiji ženske linije i relaciji muško– žensko u radu.

Zbir tekstova kao kritičko sagledavanje na specifičan način nam kon- struiše jedno vreme i portret jedne žene, ali metodom obrnute perspektive nego što to „predlaže” sam rad – od posebnog ka opštem. Ovo nam ukazuje na slojevitost rada i široku interpretaciju istog. Na- pokon, knjiga reader pred nama na izvestan način doprinosi i još jednom cilju – sumira poglede na rad Mira, skica za portret, ali i skicira umetnički portret Jelene Jureše. 18 19 20

Branka Benčić

Dvostruka ekspozicija — kolizija prošlosti i sadašnjosti

* Esej je prvobitno objavljen u publikaciji prilikom samostalne izložbe Jelene Jureše u KM Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (31. januar – 5. mart 2015). 21

Sjećanje, čak i ako ga potisnete, vratit će vam se natrag i oblikovati vaš život.1

Bilo da smo imali neposredan susret s prošlošću na temelju vlastitih ili u obliku posredovanih sjećanja, putem pripovijedanja, modelima usmene predaje, filma ili fotografije, mišljenja i stavovi prema proš- losti se ponovo sagledavaju i preoblikuju u sadašnjosti. Na taj način, društveno i kolektivno „sjećanje povijesti” nije samo rezultat činje- nica i izravnih iskustava, nego funkcionira kao narativna konstrukcija podložna pojedinačnim preispitivanjima. Radi se o procesu re- fleksivnog razumijevanja prošlosti, na temelju osobnih konstrukcija i reinterpretacija (auto)biografskog sjećanja. Uspostavljanjem veze s prošlošću, uglavnom putem slika kao alata pamćenja, umjetnici poku- šavaju razumjeti i definirati vrijeme u kojem živimo. Procesi razlaga- nja fiksnog razumijevanja ukazuju na pitanja potaknuta idejama čije se značenje artikulira u procjepu između prošlosti i sadašnjosti. Slika nostalgije, kako ističe Svetlana Boym, slika je dvostruke ekspozicije – kolizija prošlosti i sadašnjosti, iluzije i stvarnosti.2

Umjetnička istraživanja arhiva i zanimanje za historiografske prakse preispituju načine konstruiranja prošlosti, postajući katalizatorom za velik broj umjetničkih djela unutar suvremene umjetničke produkcije. To podrazumijeva otvaranje novih perspektiva i stvaranje novih značenja, baveći se prošlošću kroz različite oblike arhiva kao alata za rekonstruiranje povijesti; događaji i tekstovi su koncipirani kao prostor za očuvanje sjećanja. Riječ je o arhivu kao kritičkoj metodologiji,

1 W. G. Sebald u razgovoru sa Mayom Jaggi, „The Last Word”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities. highereducation (pristupljeno februara 2015). 2 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 22

koja formira značenja, objašnjavajući kako se značenje redefinira i kako se okolnosti diskursa rekontekstualiziraju kroz sjećanje.

Aproprijacija slika i priča iz prošlosti često označava stvaranje razli- čitih narativnih metodologija, gradeći veze prema sadašnjosti, dok istovremeno podiže svijest o alternativnim ili marginaliziranim pri- povijestima.3 Katerina Gregos ističe poziciju „umjetnika kao povje- sničara”, dok Hal Foster naglašava „umjetnike arhiviste” koji poku- šavaju učiniti povijesne podatke, često izgubljene ili istisnute, fizički prisutnima.4

Sva mora svijeta lomila su valove o njezino srce.5

Slično kao i potraga za identitetom u romanu Austerlitz W.G. Sebal- da, video instalacija MIRA, skica za portret (2010–2014) Jelene Jureše istražuje potragu za individualnim identitetom i borbu protiv amnezije među djelićima sjećanja. Jurešin rad je prožet praksama umjetnika kao povjesničara i istraživača arhiva. Ona kreće u potragu kako bi pokušala ponovno stvoriti i rekonstruirati povijesnu priču o jednom jedinstvenom i relativno anonimnom ljudskom životu, dajući mu glas i otkrivajući niz događaja i okolnosti koje se isprepliću. Na taj način, MIRA, skica za portret prikazuje intimno istraživanje granica memorije. „To je priča o jednoj ženi, jednoj obitelji, jednoj zemlji, i tri rata” – objašnjava umjetnica.6

3 Katerina Gregos, „Is the Past Another Country?”, Manifesta Journal, http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/fungus-contemporary/past-another- country (pristupljeno februara 2015). 4 Hal Foster, „An Archival Impulse”, u October, 110 (Autumn 2004), str. 3–22. 5 James Joyce, „Eveline”, u Great English Short Stories (Stuttgart, 1979). 6 Jelena Jureša, artist’s statement. 23

Mira, na sanskrtu znači ocean, more…

U usporenim, zaustavljenim, zamrznutim slikama, prikazima mora i morskog krajolika MIRA, skica za portret otvara se pred našim oči- ma, donoseći pred nas afektivne, uranjajuće (imerzivne) slike. Osjeća- mo se kao da smo uronjeni u tamu prostora u kojem se odvija projekcija. I osjećamo kao da apsorbiramo umjetnički rad „osmozom”, kroz kožu. Na početku, scene slijede jedna drugu u tišini. Nakon nekoliko trenutaka počinje pripovijedanje glasom pripovjedača u off-u, razbija- jući početnu šutnju, vremenom otkrivajući realistični narativ koji se temelji na sjećanjima, povijesti i dokumentima. Rad je formiran kao travelogue koji dokumentira imaginarno, nemoguće putovanje kroz prostor i vrijeme – pejzaže, zemlje, ideologije, rat – u protoku slika koje protiču pred našim očima: prostor Balkana kroz dvadeseto stolje- će, u ratu i miru, obilježavajući dugu povijest tragedija, nasilja, susreta različitih nacionalnosti, Drugi svjetski rat te kompleksnu povijest Jugoslavije. Instalacija završava zatamnjenjem i stvaranjem predosje- ćaja raspada, gdje Mirina smrt u prometnoj nesreći djeluje kao oštar rez – završavajući životne događaje, utjelovljujući nasilni prekid koji zaključuje priču.

Pripovijest prati živote Mire i njezine obitelji iz razdoblja prije njezi- nog rođenja do njezine tragične smrti, koristeći različite vizualne materijale i strategije – od „posuđenih” arhivskih fotografija iz obitelj- skog albuma do slika popularne kulture, recentno snimljenih scena pejzaža, video snimaka i fotografija. Sav taj materijal oživljava obitelj- sku povijest Mirinih predaka.

Mira, u slavenskim jezicima, znači mir…

Drugi dio video instalacije počinje nagovještajem kraja Drugog svjetskog rata, konstituiranjem nove države i Mirinim rođenjem – uvođenjem Mire u priču. Iako je formativni interes na Miri kao 24 25

protagonistici, ona se pojavljuje tek u drugoj polovici djela, kada se narativno žarište i stajalište, strateški pomiče.7 Ovakvim strukturira- njem, Jelena Jureša je uspostavila širok i svjesno fragmentiran povi- jesni i kontekstualni okvir događaja koji su prethodili Mirinom živo- tu (u prvom dijelu instalacije), prikazujući brojne fragmente osobnih i kolektivnih povijesti i tragičnih sudbina.

Izložba je u oblikovana kao konstelacija fragmenata, spajajući različi- te formate – knjigu, seriju fotografija, video instalaciju – insceniraju- ći oblik dijaloga između slika i teksta. Monumentalna i apsorbirajuća dvokanalna filmska instalacija, zauzima središnje mjesto i orkestri- ra različite elemente rada, istražujući i izlažući prikupljene materijale. Upravo kroz postupke otkrivanja i čitanja knjige i filma shvaća- mo tekst i slike koje se odvijaju pred nama. Središnji dio, strukturiran kao instalacija velikog formata i gotovo dugometražnog trajanja, poziva promatrača da uroni i slijedi sudbinu te anonimne žene. Vođeni impulzivnim istraživanjem arhiva i priča, jedinstvene poetike i sen- zibiliteta umjetnice, rad reflektira i ljudski život i jedno stoljeće, „ži- vot pojedinca i kolektivno povijesno razdoblje – okosnica ovog doba je slomljena”.8 Gotovo kao da se cijelo fragmentirano stoljeće, povije- sni događaji kao dijelovi njegove službene historiografije, odrazilo u nizu malih, individualnih, privatnih i nevidljivih povijesnih trenutaka koji su skriveni i zaboravljeni na marginama postojanja. Pukotine i frakture odražavaju razlike u odnosima i konceptu vremena – koji se

7 Mira je bila majka supruga umetnice, rođena 1946. a poginula u saobraćajnoj nesreći 1990. 8 Vidi Alain Badiou i Giorgio Agamben o poeziji Osipa Mandelstama: Alain Badiou, „The Beast”, u Century (Malden, MA, i Cambridge, 2007), str. 17, i Giorgio Agamben, „What Is the Contemporary?”, u What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA, 2009), str. 41–43. 26

formiraju kao životni vijek pojedinca i povijesno vrijeme.9 Upravo se između dva poimanja vremena – povijesnog i subjektivnog vremena, privatnog i javnog – smjestilo vrijeme ovoga djela.

U MIRI, Studiji za portret, Jelena Jureša dekonstruira i ponovo rekon- struira svoj portret Mire kao dvostruki proces, s jedne strane uzima- jući u obzir pojmove portreta kao kodiranog žanra povijesti umjetnosti, dok s druge strane, u „studiji za portret”, umjetnica naglašava proces konstrukcije identiteta. Konstruirani pomoću jezika i reprezentacije, identiteti ne predstavljaju stabilno jedinstvo, nego niz ide- oloških pozicija kao privremeno mjesto susreta različitih kodova na raskrižju društvenih formacija i osobnih povijesti. Jureša se upušta u čin pripovijedanja i angažira glas pripovjedača koji zajedno s ar- hivskim i snimljenim fotografijama te video segmentima predstavlja konceptualizaciju putovanja kroz „tkanje prostora i vremena”, koji kao da su djelovali kao podsjetnik na zamišljeno putovanje, potragu za smislom i pokušaj da se doprinese stvaranju atmosfere melankolije.

Dok glas pripovjedača otkriva opsežnu biografsku priču o povijesti i pred-povijesti Mire i njezine obitelji tijekom nekoliko generacija, vizualni dio donosi polaganu izmjenu slika. Svjesni smo uglavnom dvi- je vrste slikovnih tokova koji slijede jedan drugoga u paralelnoj mon- taži: arhivskih obiteljskih fotografija i opsežnih pejzažnih snimki, statičnih i pokretnih, zamrznutih video prizora koji dokumentira- ju prirodu, mapirajući teritorije bivše Jugoslavije – rijeke, šume, cvi- jeće, nebo, leptire, slapove … u dugim kadrovima koji ukazuju na as- pekt trajanja prizora, dok su krajolici ispražnjeni ljudske prisutnosti. Jelena Jureša vratila se na odabrane lokacije kako bi istražila ovaj susret s prošlošću, imajući u vidu da je krajolik mogao eventualno ostati isti. Takve slike ne slijede doslovno narativ kako bi ilustrirale priču,

9 Giorgio Agamben, „What Is the Contemporary?”, u What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), str. 41–43. 27 28

nego su namijenjene stvaranju paralelnog vizualnog prostora, a gotovo istovremeno funkcionirajući kao šavovi koji nas intenzivno vezuju dok nas uranjaju u linearnost. Oni također naglašavaju nemir koji se osjeća i odstupaju od uobičajene percepcije, stvarajući asocijativno polje, dok nas podsjećaju da je umjetničko djelo složena fragmentarna struktura, gdje se odnos između oblika i sadržaja može smatrati laba- vim, gotovo proizvoljnim, ali kojega je umjentica istraživala i promi- slila. Segmenti tišine, pripovijedanje i pauze, strateški su oblikovani da bi tvorili dramaturške točke neizvjesnosti i napetosti, osjećaj praznine u suprotnosti s faktografskim pripovijedanjem priča.

Drugi dio uvodi fokus na ženski lik, uglavnom na aspekte osobnog i privatnog. Mirin privatni život i intimne, osobne priče zauzimaju ve- ćinu narativnog prostora. Ovdje se također po prvi put uvode i slike interijera. Interijeri se obično shvaćaju kao privatna mjesta ženskog identiteta, dok se javni prostori smatraju područjima muškog auto- riteta. Cijelom svojom duljinom rad je strukturiran u dihotomijama: interijer i eksterijer, privatno i javno, zvuk i tišina. Ovu izmjenu iz- među dokumenta i pejzaža, kulture i prirode, povremeno prekida pri- sutnost ženskog lika, neočekivana pojava izolirana na crnoj pozadini – flamenco plesačica, opsjena / fatamorgana, isječak iz sna, duh, za- mjena, svjedok… Uz snimke igranog filma La Violetera iz 1958., doprinosi osjećaju bijega od stvarnosti i prisutstvu elemenata nadrealnog. Riječima Waltera Benjamina, implicira „prostor prožet ljudskom svi- ješću koji ustukne pred prostorom prožetim nesvjesnim”.10

Imerzivne scene krajolika igraju ulogu u stvaranju „pejzaža sjećanja”. One se izmjenjuju s raznim oblicima fotografskih slika, iz obiteljske arhive fotografija, do slika interijera i slika iz filma, stvarajući napetost i koliziju na sjecištu statičnih i pokretnih slika. Kroz različite

10 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA, 2003), str. 266. 29 30

medije Jelena Jureša istražuje složen odnos u kojem se međusobno presijecaju kultura, povijest, sjećanje, pojedinac i društvo. Pejzaž kao model ljudske konceptualizacije prirode služi da bi se reflektirala ra- zličita raspoloženja i složeni odnosi; postaje mjesto propitivanja odnosa prostora, povijesti, sjećanja i identiteta. Modeli reprezentacije stvoreni su na temelju različitih fragmenata – slojeva iz neposred- ne okoline, elemenata svakodnevnog života, mitova, priča, dijelova povijesti, kulture, koji grade i oblikuju procese mišljenja i percepcije, što odgovara društveno-političkom i povijesnom kontekstu, dok u isto vrijeme odražava unutarnju situaciju, iskustvo, povijest ili pri- ču. Umjetničko djelo predstavlja novi simbolički prostor koji implicira nekakvu vrstu epistemologije zaborava i rekonstrukcije horizonta. Kroz cijeli rad provlači se tehnika demontaže intimnih i uobičajenih odnosa koji povezuju stvarno i imaginarno, vidljivo i nevidljivo, istra- žujući napetosti između dominantnih i slabije zastupljenih narativa.

Film je opisan … kao kameleon i lik umjetnika kao tajnika nevidljivog. Ali to tako- đer djeluje i u obrnutom smjeru. Umjetnik je kameleon i film je tajnik nevidljivog.11

Video instalacija otkriva se pred nama kao susret s prošlošću. To stvara specifičan odnos prema povijesti, u kojoj različiti narativi koegzi- stiraju istovremeno – historizirana fabula, elementi koje percipira- mo kao romantizirane ili nalik fikciji. Melankolija koja je oblikovana u skladu s fizičkom i vremenskom udaljenosti mjesto je gdje se susre- ću sjećanje, vrijeme, povijest, interpretacija i imaginacija, gdje je zna- čenje duboko ukorijenjeno u kolektivnom sjećanju. Poetski i melan- količni prizori postaju stalni motivi umjetničkog interesa, opisujući

11 Marine Hugonnier u razgovoru sa Anne-Sophie Dinant, „Marine Hugonnier: The Secretary of the Invisible,” Vdrome, http://www.vdrome.org/hugonnier. html (pristupljeno februara 2015). 31

neopisiv i artikulirajući vizualni jezik kao transfer između podsvje- snog i slika, dok njihov protok formira asocijativne prostore koje mo- žemo percipirati kao stvarnost ili fikciju. Uz korištenje fotografskih i video snimaka, statičnih i pokretnih slika, napetosti između dokumenta ili nadrealnog, Jelena Jureša ispituje povijesne pozicije, pitanja istine, identiteta, sjećanja, trauma i gubitka. Ona ističe gotovo instin- ktivnu potrebu da otkrije stvarnost koja je izgubljena, da je pokuša rekonstruirati. Instalacija nam se otkriva kao mjesto „nemogućeg susreta” koji utjelovljuje određene veze sa prošlošću, kao „propušteni susret sa stvarnim”.12

Fotografija je usko povezana s gubitkom, tvrdi George Baker; kao slika nestanka, to je trag događaja koji blijede i nestaju pred našim oči- ma i iz naših sjećanja. S druge strane, medij videa podržava proširenu vremensku dimenziju slike, u svrhu fikcionalizacije vremena i prostora, kako bi stvorio prizore koji fiksiraju naš pogled. Čini se da je vrijeme, primajući karakteristiku „tekućine” (liquid time / tekuće vrijeme), zaustavljeno između prošlosti i sadašnjosti, oscilirajući između stvarnosti i sna. U kontinuiranom protoku statične i pokretne slike, upravo se na mjestu i trenutku njihovog spajanja događa da emocio- nalna napetost između fikcionalnog prostora priče i fizičkog prostora kojeg zauzima dobiva oblik, obavijajući gledatelja u tami projekcija. Spoj koji povezuje dijelove umjetničkog djela uspostavljen je kroz fluidnost jezika, protok slika i filmskih tehnika.

Fotografija i video koriste svoje specifične mogućnosti prikaza stvarnosti, metode ponovne reprodukcije, vraćanja i zaustavljanja vremena, konceptualne i medijske alate i procese uključene u konzerviranje slika i događaja, gdje je i sama fotografija očuvana kao prikaz sjećanja.

12 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA, 1996), str. 134. 32

Jelena Jureša postavlja aproprijaciju postojećih slika, njihov prijenos i procese njihove medijacije, u središte svojih interesa – narativne i sim- boličke interese, one koji se temelje na umjetničkim istraživanjima i istraživanjima medija. Temelji se na aproprijaciji statične i pokretne slike: film / video, fotografije, smrznuti kadrovi, video snimke. To su fragmenti iz obiteljskih albuma, koji predstavljaju osobnu arhivu, ponovno sastavljene, već uokvirene scene izblijedjelih fotografija. Zamrznute u vremenu, one svjedoče o protoku vremena upisanom u „pronađe- nim”, starim ili novim slikama gotovo arhivskog karaktera. One predstavljaju određenu melankoliju, kao nemoguć susret s prošlošću.13

Postupci medijacije – proces prijenosa slike iz jednog medija u drugi – postaju ključni u strukturi djela. Uspostavlja vezu s prošlošću medija s naglaskom na vremenskoj dimenziji. A dimenzija nestajanja, odnosno proces dematerijalizacije, nesvediv samo na sliku smrti, predstavljen je ovim prijenosom.14 Knjiga Smrt 24× u sekundi Laure Mulvey istražu- je ulogu koju nove medijske tehnologije igraju u našem iskustvu filma, preko razmišljanja o stasisu (statičnosti), punctumu (vrhuncu), životu, smrti i digitalnom prekidu linearnosti. Smještajući prapovijest kinematografije u fotografiju i post-kinematografsko doba u digitalno po- dručje, Mulvey, u svojoj u knjizi, postavlja statičnu fotografiju na po- vršinu kinematografije. Paradoks između pokreta i statičnosti progoni film od njegovog početka. U odnosu na statičnost i fotografiju, Mulvey raspravlja o pokušajima shvaćanja raznih pitanja: o paradoksu vremena, Roland Barthesovom „to je bilo sada” i André Bazinovom „balzami- ranom vremenu”, koncepcijama fotografije kao zapisa iz prošlosti koji poseže prema budućnosti, fotografskom indeksu, tragu koji je, dok je

13 George Baker, „Some Things Moyra Taught Me”, Frieze, 130 (April 2010), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/some_things_moyra_taught_me/ (pristupljeno februara 2015). 14 Leonida Kovač, „Nepoznat netko”, u Ivan Faktor: Fritz Lang und Ich 1994–2004, Gliptoteka HAZU (Zagreb, 2004), str. 22. 33

označavao smrt, imao utjecaj na budućnost.15 Na isti način na koji se smatralo da je film omogućavao život mrtvim stvarima, sada se smatra da digitalna tehnologija daje novi život kinematografiji.

Razmjena procesa i utjecaja između kulture, medija i povijesti djeluje na dva načina. Novi mediji redefiniraju stare, ali oni su također podložni utjecaju starijih medija. Marshall McLuhanovo Razumijeva- nje medija: Produžeci čovjeka objašnjava da je sadržaj bilo kojeg medija drugi medij. Nadalje, teoretičari definiraju remedijaciju kao proces kojim nove medijske tehnologije poboljšavaju nedostatke ranijih tehnologija. Ističu specifičan oblik transformacije medija, razmatran u širokoj petlji odnosa koje nazivamo strategijama reprezentacije, jer se radi o reprezentaciji jednog medija drugim. S jedne strane, fenomen je transparentna neposrednost koja nastoji „sakriti” proces remedijacije u činjenju medija nevidljivim, dok s druge strane, tu je oblik (hiper) medijacije koji čini vidljivim sam proces remedijacije, reprezentaciju jednog medija pomoću drugoga.16

MIRA, skica za portret razvija se u imerzivnu dvodijelnu video instalaciju koja dominira galerijskim prostorom. Naracija nije linearna nego fragmentarno strukturirana. Projekcije su odvojene kao prostorni elementi u galeriji. Upravo u tim prazninama i pukotinama, između ekrana, oblikovan je novi smisao djela, kojeg je ponekad i nemoguće artiku- lirati verbalno, nego istražiti kao specifično iskustvo. U višekanalnim video instalacijama, multiplikacijama ekrana i projiciranim slikama, destabilizacija fiksnih uvjeta promatranja postaje način fokusiranja pa- žnje gledatelja na iskustvo i doživljaja percepcije djela, ukazujući na

15 Laura Mulvey, Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 16 Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 34

složene odnose suvremenog subjekta u medijziranom prostoru i vremenu.17 Ovaj „deiktički zaokret” u recentnoj produkciji pokretnih slika umjetnika upućuje na projekcije kao događaj i na mjesto projekcije kao referencijalni prostor. To ukazuje na estetiku i prakse kinemato- grafske konstrukcije, na formiranje subjektivnih okruženja, na osjeća- je nesigurnosti i nestabilnosti.18 Pojmovi „zavodljive nematerijalnosti” i „mimetičke obavijenosti”, koji se koriste za opisivanje galerijskih video instalacija, karakteristična su obilježja protoka slika u suvremenoj vizualnoj kulturi. Multimedijalne instalacije razvijaju nove audiovizu- alne forme, stvarajući doprinos u proizvodnji subjektivnosti. Filmske i video instalacije u galerijama emancipiraju promatrača od ograničenja tradicionalne kinematografije. Galerijska projekcija omogućava stvaranje različitih prostornih i vremenskih veza. Višestruki ekrani predstavljaju prostore diskontinuiteta na temelju pukotina i pocjepa između ekranskih slika, među kojima je smješten gledatelj.

***

Danas je prostor između vizualnih umjetnosti i tradicionalne kinematografije toliko zasićen crossoverima da je nemoguće ući u trag jasnoj granici između njih. Dok neki umjetnici rade s postojećim materijalom kroz aproprijaciju, s pronađenim snimkama i kinematografijom kao svojevrsnim gotovim proizvodom, drugi se upuštaju u beskrajne mogućnosti filma i instalacija, radeći s kodovima i konvencijama institucija umjetnosti i filma i izlažući radove u galerijama. Od umjet- ničkih praksi proširenog filma u kasnim 1960-ima, kontekst kina kao konceptualne, ideološke i institucionalne infrastrukture u kojoj se filmovi izlažu je postao dio kritičkog diskursa koji se odnosi na insti- tucije kinematografije, arhiva, ili muzeja, te sudjeluje u artikuliranju

17 Alison Butler, „A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary Gallery Film and Video”, u Screen 51, vol. 4 (2010), str. 305–23. 18 Ibid. 35

ontološkog i kulturnog statusa umjetničke produkcije. U kontekstu takvih umjetničkih praksi, čini se da suvremena umjetnost igra ulogu u paralelnoj povijesti i budućnosti pokretnih slika, kao prostor za istra- živanje mogućnosti i granica novih kinematografskih/audiovizualnih oblika. Galerijski filmovi hibridne su forme smještene između institucija kina i galerija, preispitujući njihove konvencije i anticipirajući neke nove medijske prakse. Povijesno se smještajući između medijskih formi, formata i institucija, njihovih zamršenih odnosa.19

Formirane na raskrižju prostora suvremene umjetnosti i kinematografije, pokretne slike umjetnika su specifična praksa koja se formira oko susreta tradicija eksperimentalnog, dokumentarnog filma, uz utjecaje instalacija, video umjetnosti, performansa ili fotografije – stvarajući sklisko polje prakse pokretnih slika bez čvrstih definicija. Apsorbirajući različite prakse i preuzimajući određeni oblik „narativnog” videa, umjetnici se bave razrađenim i složenim kinematograf- skim odnosima i strukturama, raslojavajući dramaturgiju i obradu video slike. Arhiv fotografskih i filmskih slika dvadesetog stoljeća, kao dio kolektivnog sjećanja, sadržan je u raznim djelima umjetnika, uka- zujući na ulogu suvremene umjetnosti u uspostavljanju veze s povije- šću. Umjetnici koriste narative koji uključuju refleksije društvenog ili kulturnog konteksta za stvaranje vizualno impresivnih djela koja sa- drže kinestetičke osobine i atmosferu napetosti i melankolije. Sadržaj ovih radova često predstavlja konceptualizaciju putovanja kroz prostor i vrijeme i prostor imaginacije, oblikujući nove svjetove. Slike i priče u suvremenim filmovima, videima ili multimedijalnim instalacijama umjetnika imerzivne su i poetične, istražuju vizualne kodove i filmski jezik, te složene odnose između pojedinca i društva.

19 Branka Benčić, „Cinemaniac X: Curating Moving Images”, u Cinemaniac X (Pula: MMC Luka, 2011), i Branka Benčić, „Think Film. Think Cinema. Think Exhibition. Think Film Festival (not necessarily in that order)”, in Cinemaniac/ Think Film (Pula: MMC Luka, 2013). 36 37 38

Jelena Jureša Aneta Stojnić

Mira_prepiska 39

Subject: Mira_prepiska Date: Monday, March 3, 2016, 5:06 PM From: Jelena Juresa To: Aneta Stojnic

Draga Aneta,

Započinjanje ove vrste prepiske iziskuje da delujem dvojako: da se obraćam Tebi, kao inicijalnoj primateljki poruke, ali da razmišljam i o budućim čitaocima ovog teksta. Šetam tamo-amo između sada i dolazećeg onda, i uviđam da na taj način postojim i dok sam u procesu kreiranja narativa za rad u nastajanju.

Kako da oblikujem tekst da istovremeno bude intiman, a zanimljiv i nekome ko nisi Ti, samo je jedno od pitanja koja se nameću i odlažu početak pisanja. Pisanje prekida prijateljica koja traži savet: dobila je ponudu da radi u Belgiji. Izbegavam da dajem konačne odgovore o ovoj zemlji, o ljudima, o vremenskim prilikama. Od našeg preseljenja u Belgiju, tražim dodatno vreme za povratak Zebaldu (W. G. Sebald): pri svakom susretu sa Palatom pravde u Briselu, ili antverpenskom železničkom stanicom, mislim na Austerlica. I sada, dok biram fotografije za ‘reader’, nailazim na leptira, tog ‘istog’, snimljenog u Bihaću, Jasenovcu, na Sutjesci. Ipak, dok sam radila „Miru” nisam nikad pomišljala na tu naknadnu i moguću referencu, Zebaldovu opčinjenost insektima, posebno moljcima i leptirima. Čitala sam negde da nije bio privučen preobražajem kao takvim, preobličavanjem ovih životinja u krilata stvorenja, već da ga je očaravalo ono što sledi – nečujni način njihovog nestajanja. 40

On Mar 10, 2016, at 0:05 AM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Draga Jelena,

Dvojakost naše prepiske zbilja je dvostruka: u vremenu – između trenutnog i budućeg, ali i u prostoru – između privatnog i javnog. To svakako nije slučajno. Preplitanje prošlosti i budućnosti, nelinearno kretanje kroz „ahroničko” vreme video-instalacije, ali i tenzija između privatnog i javnog, između porodičnog života i istorijskog konteksta, između istorije, istorizacije i sećanja, između efemernog i neizbrisivog, između „prirode” i konstrukcije (priroda jeste konstrukcija?), između ličnog i političkog… to su prvi slojevi sa kojima se susreće posmatrač, gledalac i čitalac tvoga rada. Rekla bih da se upravo kroz te tenzije, prestupe i preplitanja otvaraju sva dalja suštinska pitanja. Elaborirana studija za portret, stavlja pred svog recipijenta nedvosmislen i nemilosrdan zahtev: pozicionirati se istorijski i politički.

Ko je Mira? 41

On Mar 15, 2016, at 11:18 PM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Draga Aneta,

Čak i odgovor na to pitanje ne može biti jednoznačan. S jedne strane, Mira jeste postojala, zahvaljujući lomnom trenutku u kom su se prepleli životi njenih roditelja, a usred istorijskih i političkih previranja. Njeno postojanje, stoga, bilo je oduvek krhko, i pod bremenom potisnute porodične tragedije: njeno nasleđe kao kćerke jedinog preživelog potomka porodice bosanskih Jevreja, stradalih u Holokaustu, stravično je. Smrti članova porodice Perera tvore svojevrsnu mapu, počev od logora na Sajmištu, preko Đakova, Loborgrada, do Jasenovca. S druge strane, Mirin život možemo sagledati i kao čudo, kao okvir kroz koji se možemo dalje zagledati u taj vremenski interval koji se, eto, začudno poklopio sa odsustvom rata i postojanjem jedne države.

On Mar 19, 2016, at 3:20 AM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Draga Jelena,

Tvoj pristup u radu sa vizuelnim materijalom veoma je specifičan, kao i način na koji preklapaš filmski jezik i „storytelling” format u ovoj video-instalaciji. Koristiš arhivske, istorijske materijale, poigravaš se sa značenjima enterijera i eksterijera, kao i odnosima istorije, kulture i prirode (koja je ništa manje konstrukcija). Priroda nikada nije nevina i nema neutralnog prostora niti pejzaža – svaki je natopljen, nađubren, isušen ili posejan brojnim slojevima istorije. Dramaturški, ti dopuštaš svojoj publici da montira sopstvenu priču između dva kanala video-instalacije, pri čemu smo, dok gledamo jedan od videa, uvek svesni prisutnosti onog drugog, kao glasa u pozadini, kao sećanja.

To „čudo” ili „začudnost” koje pominješ u kontekstu Mirinog života i istorijskog perioda sa kojim se preklapa, deluje skoro kao parafraza replike iz 42

Brehtove „Majke Hrabrosti”: rat je prirodno stanje čovečanstva, mir je samo prekid između ratova.

Možda je ovo dobar momenat da otvorimo pitanje: koji narativ ti donosiš kao umetnica u svojoj video-instalaciji, odnosno u koji hegemoni narativ intervenišeš? Kako vidiš svoju poziciju umetnice u procesima istorizacije? Odnosno, koje politike generiše dramaturgija koju uspostavljaš između svog vizuelnog i tekstualnog narativa?

On Mar 19, 2016, at 9:56 PM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Draga Aneta,

Pripovedački deo, da ga tako nazovem, oslanja se na sećanja i svedočenja osoba čiji su životi isprepleteni sa dešavanjima koja rad prati, a neki od njih portretisani su i u samom radu. Smatrala sam ključnim predstavljanje ličnih istorija u kontekstu istorije jedne zemlje, ali i posebnog vremenskog vakuuma tokom postojanja Jugoslavije. U prvi mah možemo razmišljati o životopisu jedne žene, i jedne države, te beleženju epohe. Ipak, ovo je privid, jer je geografija vremena u radu vrlo specifična. Iako fotografija i video- kadrovi upućuju na mesta u koja se posmatrač iznova vraća tokom praćenja video-instalacije, njihovo značenje biva dopunjeno novim dešavanjima (i istorijama). Ta krhkost trenutka, i ranjivost mesta čija nevinost ne može da opstane, naveli su me da stvorim okvir kroz koji mogu propitati i sopstveno osećanje nedostajanja, i tu rupu koju dišemo nakon raspada Jugoslavije.

Vremenski period koji pripovedanje obuhvata, počinje 1492; godinom ključnom za praćenje genealogije jedne porodice, ali istovremeno, to je presudna vremenska kota za promišljanje o istoriji migracija i genocida. U godini kada su dekretom kraljice Izabele od Kastilje i Ferdinanda od Aragona, sefardski Jevreji prognani iz Španije, pod izdašnim pokroviteljstvom španske 43

krune počinje ključno Kolumbovo putovanje. Ovaj istorijski trenutak vrlo je potresan, u njemu su se sukobile i splele dve putanje, proterivanje i migracija španskih Jevreja, te duga istorija progona i genocida na tlu Amerike.

Bez obzira na to koliko „arhiv” nameće ideju o pogledu unazad, nalazim da je promišljanje o arhivu nužno za razumevanje sadašnjice, te odnosa moći koji dovode do određenog trenutka koji potom prepoznajemo kao istorijski. Pri kraju prošlog i početkom dvadesetog prvog veka primetno je sve češće kritičko propitivanje arhiva u društvenim naukama, a shodno tome i njegova performativna zastupljenost u umetničkim praksama; čini se logičnom potreba za „citiranjem” arhiva – postoji izvesna uteha boravka u „poznatom” – arhiv nas prividno čuva od sučeljavanja sa sadašnjicom, lako stvarajući privid da je reč o analitičkom promišljanju. Nisam zainteresovana za ovaj pristup, jer verujem u kritiku, koja ne mora biti očigledna, da bi bila inteligentna.

Istorija jeste borbeno polje, pritom neosetljivo na rasizam i odsustvo ženskih glasova. Postavlja se pitanje šta konstituiše jedan dokument, vredan toga da nađe svoje mesto u arhivu. U poslednje vreme, sve više se okrećem pisanju Rebeke Šnajder, koja arhiv posmatra kao partituru, odnosno scenario, a u toj partituri fotografija je dominantni element. S te strane, možemo se ponovo vratiti čitanju razvitka fotografskog medija, te ispitati performativni karakter arhiva kao njegovu suštinu. Da li je kuriranje arhiva učinilo fotografiju izlišnom, a danas neretko i dosadnom, ili je ona oduvek bila njegov suštinski deo – to je nešto o čemu trenutno lupam glavu.

Čini mi se važnim pomenuti da ovaj rad propituje i sam medij i njegovu ulogu. Fotografija me zanima fenomenološki, i s tim u vezi, poigravanje sa idejom o njenoj „istinitosti” za mene je veoma značajno. Medij fotografije i filma nikako nisu nevini, portretisali su dvadeseti vek; događaje koji nam se čine bliskim, iako vremenski vrlo udaljenim, imamo utisak da poznajemo i izgradili smo svojevrsno sećanje na njih. Naravno, iz ovako medijski posredovanog sećanja na dvadeseti vek, skrajnuti su glasovi svih onih Drugih. Od samog svog nastanka, fotografija je bila duboko isprepletena sa kolonijalizmom i 44

imperijalizmom, i korišćena je kao sredstvo za proizvodnju uzoraka u samom začetku razvoja biološke i fizičke antropologije. Fotografisanje neevropejaca, uz pažljive koreografije grupisanja u odnosu na različito etničko poreklo, bilo je uobičajeno među istraživačima i antropolozima. Naučne studije, nastale u to vreme, postale su temeljac za rasne teorije, dok je fotografija postala deo predstave, vrlo brižljivo planirane koreografije, koja je svedočila o ljudima i mestima, šireći mit o „drugim rasama” i njihovom „prirodnom okruženju”. Fotografiji i filmu dugujemo veliki deo produkovanja zaborava, i stoga je moj odnos prema mediju vrlo složen, a u suštini logičan, i za mene jedini moguć.

U radu „Mira, skica za portret” fotografija jeste ključna, i može se posmatrati i kao partitura ispisana zajedno sa tekstom, pri čemu slika tvori tekst i obrnuto (u našem jeziku nedostaje odgovarajući koncept koji bi apstrahovao sva značenja koja možemo „smestiti” u pojam koji konotira „image” – kako šira, tako i dublja značenja). Najveći broj kadrova u video delu rada prikazuje prirodu, odnosno mesta koja su ključne tačke oko kojih se narativ lomi. Ove kadrove mahom sam snimala u Bosni, od Bihaća i reke Une, do Sutjeske, gde je priroda nemilosrdno božanstvena. Želela sam da tu lepotu suprotstavim narativu, koji je samo nemilosrdan. Trajektoriju mog puta diktirao je početni narativ, sačinjen od sakupljenih i sučeljenih sećanja, istraženih istorijskih događaja, obimne literature o ratu i svedočenja preživelih.

S tim u vezi, kao mantra odzvanja promišljanje Mišela de Sertoa, da je svaki narativ priča o putovanju, praksa prostora (Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice).1 Dok ti pišem, shvatam da ova rečenica za mene konotira dublje značenje samo dok je čitam na engleskom jeziku. Pritom – eto slučaja – to je rečenica koju je uobličio prevodilac. Kada je smestim u svoj jezik, ona gubi moć uvida, već onog trenutka kada je izgovorim ili napišem. Jezik je, u tom smislu, vrlo čudno vozilo.

1 Tout récit est un récit de voyage, – une pratique de l’espace (u originalu). 45

On Mar 20, 2016, at 3:55 PM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Draga Jelena, kažeš:

> Čini se logičnom potreba za „citiranjem” arhiva – postoji izvesna uteha boravka u „poznatom” – arhiv nas prividno čuva od sučeljavanja sa sadašnjicom, lako stvarajući privid da je reč o analitičkom promišljanju. Nisam zainteresovana za ovaj pristup, jer verujem u kritiku, koja ne mora biti očigledna, da bi bila inteligentna.

Mislim da je ovde bitno razumeti odnos između arhiva i sećanja, različitih procesa i politika istorizacije, te eksplicitnih koliko i implicitnih intervencija u savremena čitanja istorije.

Arhiv svakako nije pasivni kontejner, nekakvo objektivno i neutralno skladište istorije, koje se bavi samo istorijom i tiče se samo nje – naprotiv, arhiv upravlja i kontroliše način na koje će istorija biti čitana i samim tim oblikuje aktuelnu političku realnost. Prema Deridi, proces arhivizacije „produkuje isto koliko i beleži događaj”. U tom smislu, moć nad sećanjem predstavlja moć nad identitetom, moć nad fundamentalnim načinima na koje društvo traži dokaze za ono što njegove osnovne vrednosti jesu, u onome što su bile, pri čemu sećanje postaje prostor u kom se o socijalnoj moći pregovara, gde se ona izaziva, osporava ili potvrđuje. Uspostavljanjem sećanja uspostavljaju se narativi koji su uvek i nužno ideološki, u kontekstu sadašnjice. I baš zato, prostor sećanja mora stalno iznova biti kritički razmatran, dekonstruisan i rekonstruisan.

Mirinu priču nam donosiš ti (dakle iz druge ruke), kao pripovedačica, ona koja skicira, što znači posmatra, promišlja i odabira. Imam utisak da si potpuno svesna odgovornosti koju kao ona koja prenosi priču preuzimaš. Da li pseudolični pristup, kroz individualnu istoriju jedne žene, zapravo možemo 46

posmatrati kao mikrointervenciju u javni diskurs savremenosti? (Možda je to ono što podrazumevaš pod kritikom koja ne mora biti očigledna.)

Zanima me kako se ta interventnost menja u odnosu na različite kontekste u kojima je rad prezentovan?

Važan deo istorijskog narativa koji nam donosiš odnosi se na Drugi svetski rat, Holokaust, Partizansku antifašističku oslobodilačku borbu, te pobedu i oslobađanje od nacističke okupacije i formiranje nove države, SFRJ.

Prilikom našeg prvog javnog razgovora o radu „Mira – skica za portret”, koji se odigrao u Gracu (Halle für Kunst & Medien, februar 2015), otvorilo se pitanje uloge države Austrije u Drugom svetskom ratu, te potonjeg višedecenijskog nesuočavanja sa nacističkom prošlošću koje je proisteklo iz zvaničnog stava da je Austrija bila „prva Hitlerova žrtva”. Posledice ovakve politike ogledaju se u savremenim problemima vezanim za (strukturalni) rasizam i antisemitizam, te je bilo važno ovo pitanje pokrenuti i tom prilikom, u datom lokalnom kontekstu.

Koja pitanja očekuješ da prikazivanje „Mire” otvori u Beogradu 2016? Kakvu intervenciju u javni diskurs predstavlja afirmativni govor o partizanskom pokretu u doba istorijskog revizionizma?

On Mar 21, 2016, at 9:28 AM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Draga Aneta,

Kao što pominješ, „prostor sećanja mora stalno iznova biti kritički razmatran”; stoga je vrlo važno preispitivanje i svest o sopstvenoj poziciji, postavljanje pitanja: „Da li pri intervenisanju u diskurs sećanja, doprinosimo zaboravljanju, odnosno koja su to sećanja kojima dajemo na važnosti, a 47

koja ostavljamo po strani?” Ako se načas vratimo arhivu, i Rebeki Šnajder, ona izražava bojazan da je i naše kritičko promišljanje sećanja uzrokovano prirodom arhiva i njegovom zadatošću. Parafrazirala bih tvoje ranije pitanje, bez mogućnosti da dam jednoznačan odgovor: „U koji hegemoni narativ intervenišem(o), ako uzmemo u obzir mogućnost da smo deo istog (proizvedenog) teatra?”

Mnogo toga napisano je o sadašnjici preplavljenoj sećanjima – „memory boom” – od razmišljanja da iz prelaska prošlog u ovaj vek živimo u vremenu komemoracije, do pisanja Andreasa Hojsena koji skreće pažnju na to da, iako se diskursi sećanja pojavljuju na globalnom nivou, u suštini, vezani su za pojedine istorije, određenih nacija i država. Analizirajući prezasićenost sadašnjice sećanjem, Hojsen poziva na diskusiju o suprotstavljanju opsesije sećanjem i kulturom amnezije, smatrajući da nema koristi suprotstavljati sećanje amneziji, već valja razumeti jedno u skladu s drugim. U opsesiji sećanjem i prošlošću, on oseća bojazan prepleta sa destruktivnim dinamizmima zaboravljanja i predlaže da, iako živimo u postaušvic kulturi, nastavak delanja u diskursu sećanja mora biti okrenut ka budućnosti. Teza da nam budućnost neće suditi za zaboravljanje, ali će nam zamerati na tome što, iako smo se sećali suviše dobro, nismo delali u skladu sa sećanjem, lako nas dovodi do sadašnje vremenske tačke. Možemo postaviti pitanje o (ne)moći prakse sećanja nakon Holokausta, u vrlo krhkom trenutku kada fašizam pokazuje svoju vitalnost na evropskom kontinentu.

Kada je reč o našem regionu, postavlja se pitanje kakvo će sećanje na dvadeseti vek imati generacije nedotaknute životom pre raspada Jugoslavije. Šizofrene istorijske revizije koje su nakon ratova devedesetih uzele maha u novim nacionalnim državama bile bi komične da nisu opasne.

Kažeš:

> Mirinu priču nam donosiš ti (dakle iz druge ruke), kao pripovedačica, ona koja skicira, što znači posmatra, promišlja i odabira. Imam utisak da si potpuno svesna odgovornosti koju kao ona koja prenosi priču preuzimaš. 48

Istina je da radim u granicama realnog, a da nisam zainteresovana za dokumentarizam, te da prostor mog umetničkog delanja ima svoje zakonitosti. Radim sa ljudima i stvarnim događajima, sećanjima, istorijom i kritikom te istorije, a opet, izbegla bih da mapiram preciznu poziciju iz koje stvaram. To ostavljam teoretičarima i kustosima, iz nekoliko razloga. Oni će, iz druge ruke, pisati o onome što ih zanima, iz prve ruke, u mom radu. A opet, posvedočiće iz druge ruke verovatno mnogo preciznije i istinitije, nego što ja sad činim iz prve, ruke. Bojim se da su precizni razlozi upuštanja u stvaranje rada „Mira, skica za portret” nedostupni čak i meni samoj. Mogu posvedočiti o određenim spoznajama u ovom trenutku – stoga i jesmo u dijalogu – ali sasvim je sigurno da ću drugačije razmišljati nekoliko godina nakon ove prepiske: imaću drugačiji osvrt na razumevanje ovog trenutka, kako sebe, tako i svog rada. Naposletku, ono što smatram nužnim, a i svojim dometom, jeste stvaranje umetničkog rada koji kreira prostor za refleksiju, za postavljanje pitanja i višeznačnost tumačenja.

I sada se opet možemo vratiti na pitanje o svedočenju i pripovedanju iz prve ruke. Kako uopšte govoriti o traumi, i kako je uvesti u umetnički prostor? O kojoj ruci govorimo, ako svedoci nisu živi?

Mirina priča je konstrukcija, upravo stoga jer je bazirana na istinitim događajima. Usled toga što je beleženje svakog sećanja i svedočenja posredovano ne samo medijem putem kog se beleži, već je posrednik i onaj koji beleži, svedočenje je preneseno, (od)uzeto, predato da postane nepripadajuće. I stoga me je pitanje odgovornosti, načina ophođenja prema onom što je (pre)dato, pratilo u svim fazama rada; bili su to dugački dijalozi sa samom sobom. Poverenje koje je postojalo u razgovoru sa sagovornicima, sa ljudima koji su mi bliski, bilo je presudno; paralelno, dešavala se sadašnjica sa svim njenim uhodanim dinamikama i odnosima, tako da je u psihološkom smislu to bilo, i još uvek jeste, specifičan doživljaj.

Istovremeno, za mene je suočavanje sa vlastitim duhovima predstavljalo imperativ. Bilo je nužno proveriti svoje sećanje na Jugoslaviju, naročito 49

u ovom vremenu divljačkih istorijskih revizija. Ovo „suočavanje” bilo je pitanje neophodnosti i uzelo je mnogo vremena, jer sam krčeći istoriju Mirine porodice, proveravala i vlastito iskustvo; da li je moje iskustvo Jugoslavije doživljeno, ili je i ono konstrukcija. Razlog da se duboko zagazi u period postojanja Jugoslavije dugovala sam i faktografskoj tačnosti koju sam želela da postignem. Ipak, najviše dugujem razgovorima sa članovima Mirine porodice i prijateljima, posebno Mirinoj majci, Minki, koja je sačuvala sećanje na stradale članove porodice Perera, kao dragoceni svedok njihovog postojanja, čije vlastito predratno, ratno i posleratno iskustvo kroje znatan deo ovog rada.

Ličnim pristupom naratora u radu, čije se uloge kroz rad menjaju naracijom koja počinje u trećem licu, a završava u prvom, želela sam da razmotrim različite uloge žene (rad ne prati samo Mirin život, već i život njene majke), mogućnosti ličnih odabira i odluka, koji nisu uslovljeni političkim događajima i našom pozicijom u odnosu na njih. Da li je moguće živeti život van unapred zadatih identitetskih odrednica, i tereta prošlih stradanja, da li se trauma prenosi na buduće generacije, da li je moguće bilo uspostaviti državu oslobođenu ratnih trauma, i šireg geopolitičkog konteksta – samo su neka pitanja koja sam želela da načnem ovim radom.

Naravno, razmišljam o kontekstima u kojima će rad biti prikazan, jer je komunikacija sa posmatračem važan deo mog promišljanja dok kreiram rad. O društveno-političkom kontekstu u kom se rad prikazuje, razgovarale smo u Gracu, i on je uvek prisutan, zato što, istorijski gledano, nijedno društvo nije nevino u odnosu na zločin. Opet, s druge strane, mogu da se nadam da ću imati priliku da u Beogradu predstavim rad koji se bavi ćutanjem nad zločinima počinjenim tokom poslednjeg rata i raspada Jugoslavije. 50

On Mar 28, 2016, at 4:42 PM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Draga Jelena,

U našem kontekstu „Mira” mi se čini važnom između ostalog zbog toga što prkosi i istorijskom revizionizmu, sa jedne strane, i hipstersko-nostalgičnom neoliberalnom konzumerizmu postsocijalističkih simbola i instant „sećanja”, sa druge strane. Dragim rečima, iako se čuvaš autointerpretacije, ne padaš u zamku depolitizacije.

U istraživanju medija fotografije i filma, te fenomenološkom pristupu o kom govoriš, razvijaš specifičan metod kojim gradiš u svoj filmski, umetnički jezik. Fokus na detalj postaje jedna od centralnih karakteristika. Na primer, način na koji iz panoramskog pogleda „silaziš” u travu, razotkrivajući zamršenost i kompleksnost nepoznanica koje ostaju u detalju, implicira ono što rad pokušava da izvede: učiniti nevidljivo vidljivim. Sa druge strane, približavanje, fokus, uvećavanje, ukrštaju i na interesantan način zamenjuju dve večito suprotstavljene pozicije posmatranog i posmatrača. Štaviše, ona koja posmatra toliko se približila da postaje ona koja nudi pogled iznutra. Baš u toj ambivalenciji, varljivosti ili izneveravanju slike nastaje tvoja poetika koja je nosilac tvoje politike. Odnosno, da se poslužim gatarijevskom terminologijom, ovde možemo govoriti o etiko-estetici i zapitati se: „Kakvo promišljanje kolektivne subjektivnosti nam nudi ova „Skica za portret?” Ovo pitanje otvara se u odnosu jezika i slike, detalja i celine ali i dramaturgiji zamenica: poigravanjem pozicijom naratora, prelaskom sa trećeg (neutralnog), na drugo (kroz direktno obraćanje): „You knew he would be waiting for you when the school bell rang, your timetable in his hand” i prvo lice (čije prvo lice?): 51

Posebno pri kraju dominira ambivalencija koju unose zamenice „ti”, „ja”, „mi”: 52

a koja ima funkciju stvaranja osećaja mnoštva, višeglasja, deindividualizacije pojedinačne priče koji ne ide ka univerzalizmu, već naprotiv, teži da oslušne moguće kolektivnosti iskustava, sa jedne strane, i istorije koju čini pluralizam mnogih „delimičnih subjektivacija” (partial subjectivities), sa druge strane.

Gledajući rad ponovo, posle dužeg vremena, shvatila sam da je moje sopstveno sećanje napravilo jednu zanimljivu distorziju. U sećanju mi je jasno ostalo gore navedeno poigravanje sa pozicijom naratora, ali sam potpuno bila zaboravila da je glas naratora muški. Kažeš:

> želela sam da razmotrim različite uloge žene (rad ne prati samo Mirin život, već i život njene majke), mogućnosti ličnih odabira i odluka, koji nisu uslovljeni političkim događajima i našom pozicijom u odnosu na njih.

Tvoja pozicija je feministička, a tvoje „pismo” žensko, odluka o muškom glasu naratora ne može biti slučajna. Kako si došla do nje?

On Mar 28, 2016, at 8:43 PM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Draga Aneta,

To si odlično primetila, postoji jasan razlog izbora muškog naratora, i upravo se vraćamo početku naše prepiske: da ovakva vrsta rada nije biografija, već je konstrukt. Bilo bi, dakako, jednostavno prevesti u određeni medijski okvir lično osećanje koje sam stvorila saznavajući o istoriji porodice i Mirinom životu, ali bi u tom slučaju nedostajao taj dodatni „pogled” koji bi kroz prividno biografsko pripovedanje razmotrio i upisao u rad višeznačnost i ostavio mogućnost refleksije. Naime, u prvom filmu, narator u trećem licu upoznaje posmatrača sa istorijom Mirine porodice i 53

događajima koji su prethodili njenom rođenju. On to čini na jedan pomalo klasičan, svakako muški način, koji nam je, pritom, najčitljiviji, jer tako smo medijski ’opismenjavani’, i sadržaj rečenog ne dovodimo u pitanje. S druge strane, otklon sa kojim narator prilazi događajima, posebno pripovedanju o zločinima, sukobljen je sa slikama koje stvaraju dodatni nivo čitanja i izazivaju nemir.

Na početku drugog filma, narator se Miri obraća u drugom licu, ne prepuštajući se empatiji. Upravo u toj igri, menjanju uloga, (ne)jasnoćama koje proizlaze iz ovog odnosa, propituje se Mirino (ne)snalaženje u različitim ulogama. Na prvom mestu Mire – deteta, druge ratne generacije, koja se nosila sa ratnim posledicama kao potomak naraštaja preživelih. Dok ti pišem, prisećam se knjige „Zašto su ćutale? – ili majka i ćerka o istom ratu” autorke Nevene Simin, koja je, osvrćući se na svoj i život svojih roditelja, posebno majčin, postavila pitanje o mogućnosti zastarevanja ratnih zločina i posledica Holokausta na sledeće generacije.

Kada narator počne da se obraća Miri u prvom licu, direktnije i intimnije, postaje gotovo opipljivo da narator, iako preuzima ulogu Mirinog sina, ne bira da je štedi, te kroz vinjete ličnih sećanja propituje Mirine odluke koje su, ispripovedane na ovaj način, dovele do tragičnog kraja. Ali upravo ta prividna oštrina svedočenja u prvom licu sukobljava se sa boli koju izaziva odsustvo onoga kome se narator obraća. I u toj koliziji, posmatrač (ne) svesno staje na Mirinu stranu, s mogućnošću da propita veze višeslojnih narativa koji se povremeno tokom trajanja rada ukrštaju, bilo da je reč o širem istorijskom kontekstu, bilo da je pogled uprt u dinamizme odnosa unutar porodice ili pojedinačne nedoumice. 54

On Apr 4, 2016, at 3:52 AM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Draga Jelena,

Moglo bi se reći da muški glas naratora uvodi jedan nivo otuđenja, gotovo brehtovske „začudnosti”, preko koje se uspostavlja direktan odnos između dela i gledaoca. Odnos koji ne funkcioniše preko puke empatije već naprotiv, podstiče gledaoca na razmišljanje i razumevanje. Ako gledalac „staje na Mirinu stranu”, on to ne čini zato što se identifikuje sa njom već usled razumevanja njenog simboličkog mesta, te kompleksnosti društveno- političkih (a lično je politično, kao što smo ranije „utvrdile”) odnosa koje ta priča (istorija) predstavlja.

Za kraj ove naše prepiske, mislim da bi valjalo da pomenemo i jedan element rada koji neopravdano, iako možda razumljivo,2 donekle pada u dugi plan u razgovorima i analizama: radi se o knjizi. Naime „Mira – skica za portret” funkcioniše na tri medijska nivoa: dvokanalnoj video-instalaciji; seriji fotografija; i knjizi. Ili bi možda ovo trebalo navesti obrnutim redosledom, gde bi knjiga bila na čelu, kao format koji prethodi onome što će se razvijti kroz druga dva medija (mada bi i ta hronologija bila konstrukcija kao i svaka druga). U knjizi je posebno zanimljiv način na koji gradiš odnos između fotografije i jezika, odnosno vizuelnog i pisanog teksta. Oko fotografija ostavljaš dosta (ili dovoljno) praznog prostora, koji u ritmičkoj strukturi knjige stvara jednu vrstu napete tišine. Punktuacije, akcenta… možda ćutanja?

Knjiga kao medij nije se našla slučajno unutar rada čija je okosnica pitanje istorizacije. Kao da se kroz ta tri formata: knjigu, video i fotografiju, poigravaš sa idejom efemernosti sećanja koje mora biti reosigurano i reinterpretirano uspostavljanjem intertekstualnog odnosa između različitih nosioca sadržaja i različitih glasova. Generator tog višeglasja je Mira – ne

2 Jer je video i vizuelno i interpretativno dominantan element. 55

kao individua već kao subjekt. Subjekt koji nas uvodi u prostor kolektivnog sećanja. Subjekt koji (se) poziva na mnoštvo, ali ne relativizuje činjenice. Govoreći o naratoru sa početka prvog videa, kažeš:

> On to čini na jedan pomalo klasičan, svakako muški način, koji nam je, pritom, najčitljiviji, jer tako smo medijski „opismenjavani”, i sadržaj rečenog ne dovodimo u pitanje.

Rekla bih da knjiga ima sličnu nameru „nedovođenja u pitanje”. O knjizi smo navikli da mislimo kao o „konačnoj”, „klasičnoj” formi, za razliku od videa, koji i dalje imamo tendenciju da doživljavamo kao nešto efemernije. Manipulišući ovim „standardima”, ti nam nudiš knjigu koja istovremeno i skicira i sumira kompletan rad. Sa druge strane, u naslovu ostavljaš prostor za nedovršenost… gotovo skromno… nazivajući ovaj kompleksan splet različitih medija, slika, tekstova, arhivskih materijala, usmenih predanja, pisanih dokumenata, mitova, fakata i kolektivnih sećanja: „Skica za portret”. Ranije si rekla:

> Mirina priča je konstrukcija, upravo stoga jer je bazirana na istinitim događajima.

Pitam se za čiji portret je „Mira” skica? Da li za period koji rad direktno razmatra ili za nadolazeće doba, ono koje je počelo tamo gde se Mira završava.

Lep pozdrav, Aneta 56 57

Bibliografske reference:

— Breht, Bertolt. Majka hrabrost, Rad, Beograd, 1964. — Breht, Bertolt. Dijalektika u teatru, Nolit, Beograd, 1966. — De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984. — Derrida, Jacques. Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996. — Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press, 1995. — Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia. Routledge, 2012. — Schneider, Rebecca. Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment. Taylor & Francis, 2011. — Simin, Nevena. Magda Simin. Zašto su ćutale? – ili majka i ćerka o istom ratu. Futura publikacije, Novi Sad 2007. — Zebald, Vinfrid Georg. Austerlic. Paideia, Beograd, 2009. 58 59 60

Kristel Stalpert

Pismo 61

1 62 63

2 64 65

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Sint-Lifens-Ese, ponedeljak, 21. mart 2016.

Draga Jelena,

Nadam se da si dobro. Znam da se spremaš da putuješ iz Genta za Srbiju. Ovo će te pismo možda zateći negde između, u tavorenju između prošlih i budućih slika jedne tuđinske domovine.

Neke slike umeju da ti ostanu u glavi.

One su sablasna prisustva u našim sećanjima, koja trepere u talasu emocija. Mira, skica za portret (2010–2014) zauvek će mi ostati u sećanju. I to je dobro. Ima jedna moćna slika pruge prekrivene mahovinom i rastinjem. Poput mnogih fotografija u Miri, ona se poigrava „nesavladivom realnošću” prošlosti. Naravno, ta slika evocira žalosnu istoriju železničke deportacije Jevreja u logore smrti, pod budnim okom nemačkih nacista i njihovih saveznika. Judenrampe koja vodi ka kapijama logora Aušvic-Birkenau u tom smislu je emblematična. Slika ima ulogu „emfatičnog obeležja” u našem kolektivnom pamćenju.1 Štaviše, ona je postala simbol čitavog jednog istorijskog događaja.

1 Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows. Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), str. 7. 67

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Uhvatim sebe kako pišem „naravno” pre nekoliko rečenica. Pitajući se da li je ta veza zaista očigledna, shvatam da, što se slika više deli i kruži, postoji sve veća opasnost da će ona stvoriti prečice u mišljenju; analogni znak zahteva – pars pro toto – kognitivno prepoznavanje čitavog događaja. On postaje „emblematični kliše”.2

Da li je moguće da nas emblematični klišei sprečavaju da promislimo složenu prirodu kulturne traume? Prema filozofu Slavoju Žižeku, nepojmljivi užas nasilnih medijskih slika i njihov jednoglasni poziv na saosećanje sa žrtvama sprečavaju nas da razmislimo o dubljim mehanizmima nasilja.3 Sklona sam tome da mu verujem.

Prođe neko vreme pre no što shvatim da takve pruge smrti postoje i u Belgiji. Istraživanje mi kazuje da je Kazerne Dosin u Mehelenu bio tranzitni logor za Jevreje i Rome (SS Samellager Mecheln), odakle je 25.259 ljudi deportovano u Aušvic. Nazivan je pretkomorom

2 Chris Vos, Bewegend verleden. Inleiding tot de analyse van films en televisieprogramma’s (Amsterdam: Boom, 2004), str. 176. 3 Slavoj Žižek, Violence. Six Sideways Glances (London: Profile Books, 2009). 69

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smrti. Samo je njih 1.123 preživelo logor smrti. Preko pedeset godina, pruga koja do njega vodi takođe je ležala obrasla rastinjem, nesvesna deportacija koje su se nekada tamo odvijale. Nakon oslobođenja, zgrada se vratila svojoj predratnoj vojnoj ulozi, kao da se ništa nije dogodilo. Tek 1996. godine, Kazerne Dosin postaje muzej, čime je priznato da je deportacija bilo.4

Teoretičar sećanja Dauve Draisma (Douwe Draaisma) ima pravo: zaboravljanje je jedno od ključnih sposobnosti sećanja.5 Ono služi kao štit u suočavanju s traumatičnim događajima. Ono omogućava ljudima koji su preživeli traumu da nastave sa svojim životima. Draisma umetnost zaboravljanja smatra neophodnom za očuvanje odnosa s najbližima i postizanje ličnog zadovoljstva. No, šta ako se ta „umetnost” zaboravljanja pretvori u politiku zaborava?

Mislim da se tu ne sme potceniti sposobnost umetnosti da dovede do spoznaje.

O narativnom prisećanju

Neke reči umeju da ti ostanu u glavi. Neke reči umeju da leče.

Narativno prisećanje se smatra važnim sredstvom „savladavanja” kulturnih trauma. Pripovedanje omogućava zajednici „da (iznađe) značenja u haotičnom svetu i nerazumljivim događajima koji se

4 Maxime Steinberg, Ward Adriaens, Laurence Schram (ur.), La destruction des juifs et des tsiganes de Belgique (Bruxelles: VUBPress, 2009). 5 Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting. Myths, Perils and Compensations, prev. Liz Waters (New Have: Yale University Press, 2015). 71

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u njemu odvijaju”.6 Kao što primećuje Džejms Tompson (James Thompson), „konstruisanje naracije iz nekadašnje boli omogućava da se ona zauzda ili preboli”.7 Pisac Aleksandar Hemon takođe je izrekao da je za razumevanje sopstvene istorije neophodno pripovedanje o sopstvenim katastrofama.8 U tom smislu, Mira, skica za portret otkriva kako je ladino, zajednički jezik raseljenih sefardskih Jevreja, bio „utešan kao zagrljaj”.9

Međutim, kakva je vrsta naracije na delu prilikom „savladavanja” kulturnih trauma? Da li je moguće da nas pojedini veliki narativi sprečavaju da promislimo dublje mehanizme nasilja?

Mediji najčešće predstavljaju činjenice i podatke dok „objektivno” izveštavaju o katastrofalnim dešavanjima. Trauma tako postaje prepoznatljiva, svrstana uz skup podataka ili konkretnu statistiku. Kao da će matematička preciznost podataka o smrtnosti učiniti da se trauma lakše svari.

Za četiri ratne godine u Jugoslaviji je poginulo preko milion vojnika i civila svih nacionalnosti, vera i političkih ubeđenja.

6 Prevod prema: Mieke Bal, „Putujući koncepti u humanistici: Vodič za pionire – Uvod”, TkH, br. 16 (Pravo na teoriju), str. 83. [Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.] Prim. prev. 7 James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the End of Effect (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), str. 45. 8 Aleksandar Hemon, „To Understand Our Histories We Have to Narrate Our Catastrophies”, Lapham’s Quarterly (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/disaster/ katastrofa). 9 Sve navode iz rada Mira, skica za portret preveo Igor Cvijanović. Prim. prev. 73

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U Miri, skici za portret, takvih preciznih brojki i objašnjenja ima malo. Više ima poetičnih izraza, praćenih slikama neuglednog prostora10 prirode ili svetlucavim trenucima tišine.

Preko sedam hiljada stradalih voda je nosila niz okuke, mnoštvo ranjenika plutalo je među njima.

Ne dobijam potpunu sliku Mire, čak ni ceo portret. Moram da se pozabavim skicom za portret. Video je nastao na osnovu (arhivskog) istraživanja, ali korišćeni dokumenti ne podležu strateškoj mise-en- chaîne 11 koja ima za cilj da ubedi posmatrača u istinitost istorijskog događaja, u istinu koju je neophodno ponovo pronaći u zakucima istorije. Ovaj video ne izveštava. On ne predočava činjenice. On ne opisuje čvrste veze niti pokušava da ubedi publiku u objektivan prikaz katastrofe. On ne tvrdi da razotkriva Istinu, baveći se istinitosnim funkcijama pre nego samom Istinom; on prvenstveno istražuje „okolnosti svoga nastanka”.12

Zato mi je uskraćena jasna, oštra slika Mire, Jozefa ili Rifke. Ono što uspevam da vidim jeste preeksponirana fotografija s previše pozadinskog osvetljenja koja nudi prikaz mlade, čije je lice sakriveno senkom. Ili uspevam da vidim cipele, pertle, prašinu i blato na cipelama. Uspevam da vidim kaleidoskop pogleda iskosa upućenih ka Mirinom životu, katastrofa koje su zadesile njenu porodicu, budući da

10 Delezov termin espace quelconque naveden prema: Žil Delez, Film 2: Slika- vreme, prevela s francuskog Ana A. Jovanović (Beograd: Filmski centar Srbije, 2010), str. 24. Prim. prev. 11 Izraz koji u kinematografiji označava montažu. Prim. prev. 12 „Istina” se u Delezovoj misli naziva istinitosnom funkcijom: „Pojam uvek ima istinitost koja mu pripada kao funkcija okolnosti njegovog nastanka” (Paul Patton, „Introduction.”, Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ur. Paul Patton, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, str. 5). 75

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je „katastrofa svuda, a njene se čestice večito presijavaju kao geler po sunčanom danu”.13

Moram da se suočim i s poetičkim poimanjem prostora. Prateći Miru, krećem se kroz intenzivan prostor u kome nema prostorne orijentacije. Umesto da pruže prostorne koordinate, slike prirode prikazuju prostor koji uskraćuje osećaj pripadnosti. Rečima Deleza i Gatarija, „to je prostor afekta, višestrukih odlika. To je haptičko, a ne optičko opažanje. (...) To je prostor koji je intenzivan, a ne ekstenzivan, prostor razdaljina, a ne mera i odlika. Intenzivni Spatium, a ne Extensio”. 14 Scena podseća – ne podseća ni na šta. Ona odiše prazninom Delezovog espace quelconque, odnosno „neuglednog prostora”.

Ti pogledi iskosa upućeni nasilju i traumi ne nude mi jednostranu, jednoznačnu perspektivu putem koje bih mogao da se identifikujem s likovima i doživim katarzu. Upravo je suprotno tačno, pogledi iskosa uvode ono što bi Delez nazvao misaonim šokom; nisam samo afektivno ophrvana, moji se afekti povezuju s Denkbild ili image pensante:15 „l’image devient pensée, capable de saisir les mécanismes de la pensée”.16 Efekat iznenađenja, „šok”, poziva me na novi vid razmišljanja; onaj koji prevazilazi matematički, lako svarljiv format činjenica i podataka. Sledeći Žižeka, može se reći da istinskom

13 Aleksandar Hemon, „To Understand Our Histories We Have to Narrate Our Catastrophies”, Lapham’s Quarterly (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ disaster/katastrofa). 14 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, prev. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), str. 528. 15 „Misaona slika” (nem., franc.). Prim. prev. 16 „Slika postaje misao, može da zahvati mehanizme mišljenja” (franc.). Prevod prema: Žil Delez, Pregovori 1972–1990, preveo s francuskog Andrija Filipović (Loznica: Karpos, 2010), str. 85.(Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972–1990, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990.) Prim. prev. 77

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mišljenju dolazi kraj kada s prevelikom lakoćom odvratimo pogled od užasâ koje razaznajemo u prikazanom nasilju. Kreativno mišljenje, međutim, nastupa onda kada kognitivni pogled zamuca i posrne, kada više ne postoji jednoglasna identifikacija. Kada nam nisu ponuđeni ni katarza niti lako svarljive činjenice i podaci.

Pa u gomilama bacani u reku Svi umotani u debelu ćebad

No, moje se misli viju prvenstveno u tišini koja sledi.

O lepljivoj tišini

Neki zvuci umeju da ti ostanu u glavi.

Seti se frustracije koju može da izazove melodija koja te uporno proganja. Takva melodija i njeno delovanje imaju izvestan zapovedni karakter. Zbog toga ih neurolog Oliver Saks naziva fiksacijama u mozgu.17 „Lako pamtljiva”, „lepljiva” muzika18 „zaposedne čoveka”,19 ostavljajući pri tome sasvim dovoljno prostora za kreativnu imaginaciju.

Auditorni prostor u Miri, skici za portret okupirao me je na jedan drugačiji način. Tišina je ostajala neprekinuta, nije bilo nikakve „lagane muzike” ili utešnih nota da me zaposednu. No, začudo, ta nezaposednutost istovremeno je budila strah i davala slobodu. Tišina

17 Oliver Saks, Muzikofilija: priče o muzici i mozgu, prevela s engleskog Jelena Stakić (Beograd: Clio, 2010], str. 43. (Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia. Tales of Music and the Brain, Knopf Canada, 2007.) 18 Ibid. 49. 19 Ibid. 53. 79

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je izmamila iz mene više emocija i značenja od bilo koje zarazne melodije, nagoneći moju muzičku imaginaciju da istupi iz okvira sentimentalnih i nostalgičnih melodija. Te krajnje raznovrsne nesvesne asocijacije bile su višestruke, ponekad apsurdne, ponekad eksplicitne, najčešće opipljive kao dim koji kulja.

Pojedini trenuci tišine dovode do prekida u mislima. Zahvaljujući tome, zamuckujem u svome tumačenju. Tada tišina nije negacija jezika, niti poza negativnosti. Ona je kreativni nagon za izražavanjem uprkos prečicama koje nude kruti jezički sistemi i jasne slike; to nije iskazivanje neizrecivog uprkos, već zahvaljujući prazninama koje tišina ostavlja. U tom smislu, tišina, odnosno „nekazivanje”, nije „opasno povlačenje, neuspeh ili mesto večitog stradanja”,20 niti „nestajanje u tišini”,21 već samouvereno prisvajanje artikulatornog potencijaliteta.

U Odi grčkoj vazi, pesnik Džon Kits se priseća zašto mu je draža ta „neva mira, netaknuta sva”, „što usvoji je vreme i tok tih” od zvuka čuvenog.

Već mis’o na te um nam zbuni sam K’o večnost; i kad vek prohuji naš Još ti ćeš zborit, sred drukčijeg zla, K’o drug čovekov kroz drukčiji vek:

20 James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the End of Effect (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), str. 45. 21 Derek Summerfield, ”‘My Whole Body is Sick… My Life is Not Good’: a Rwandan Asylum Seeker Attends a Psychiatric Clinic in London”, Forced Migration and Mental Health: Rethinking the Care of Refugees and Displaced Persons, ur. David Ingleby (London: Springer, 2006), str. 98. 81

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„To što je lepo – istina je sva, A istina je – sva lepota baš!” To Grci znaše – to je znanje tek.22 (…)

O opipljivom odsustvu

Prvo sećanje. Brada oslonjena na naslon stolice.

Ne mogu iz glave da izbacim slike praznih stolica, poneke s ćebetom prebačenim preko naslona. Ti se prizori odlikuju naglašenom intimnošću, ali istovremeno odaju utisak izrazite nepristupačnosti. Atmosfera je ispunjena opipljivim odsustvom. Eliptična priroda ovih slika leži u njihovom ambivalentnom poigravanju prisustvom i odsustvom. S jedne strane, ove slike odišu usamljenošću i izolacijom. Smrt može biti prisutna u odsustvu živog tela. Božićna jelka i poneka šarena traka kao da ne pripadaju takvom okruženju. Ćebad ima ulogu obrisa iscrtanih kredom koje policija koristi da označi položaj odnesenog leša.

S druge strane, ćebe na naslonu podseća me i na telo koje je nekada bilo ušuškano u njegovu toplinu. Neko je prebacio ćebe preko fotelje. Barem je taj neko mislio na potrebu za udobnošću. Neko se starao o osobi kojoj je trebalo pomoći.

Stari ljudi zaslužuju pažnju. (...) Večeraš s njima, zabavljaš ih, pomažeš im da ne misle na odsutnu decu. Pitaš se da li će neko voditi računa o tebi kada ostariš.

22 Kitsovi stihovi navedeni su prema prepevu Ranke Kuić: Džon Kits, „Oda grčkoj vazi”, Antologija engleske romantičarske poezije, uvodni eseji, izbor, prevod, beleške i komentari Ranka Kuić (Beograd: BMG, 1999), str. 298–299. Prim. prev. 83 84

Jednoga dana, u budućnosti, prisetiću se ovih reči.

Mira, skica za portret (2010–2014) zauvek će ostati u mome sećanju. I to je dobro. Rad zahteva oprezno kretanje duž iskosa bačenih pogleda. On zahteva odmicanje od jednostranog pogleda na nasilje što ga vrši pojedinac ili grupa koja se dâ jasno identifikovati. Tek posle nekog vremena, uvežbanim okom koje gleda iskosa, počinjem da nazirem obrise pozadine koja pobuđuje izlive nasilja.

Veliki zagrljaj, i čuvaj se,

Kristel 85

19 86 87

Spisak reprodukcija:

1. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, kadar iz videa 2. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, kadar iz videa 3. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, kadar iz videa 4. Klod Lancman, Šoa, 1985, kadar iz filma 5. Lars Fon Trir, Evropa, 1991, kadar iz filma 6. Klod Lancman, Šoa, 1985, kadar iz filma 7. Fotografija snimljena u Jasenovcu (Hrvatska), na mestu bivšeg koncentracionog logora, u julu 2012. (Jelena Jureša, Mira skica za portret, 2010–2014) 8. Jelena Jureša, Mira skica za portret, 2010–2014, fotografija 9. Ana Torfs, Displacement, galerijski prikaz, WIELS, Brisel, 2014 © fotografija: Ana Torfs 10. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, fotografija 11. Alen Rene, Noć i magla, 1955, kadar iz filma 12. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, fotografija 13. Džon Everet Mile, Ofelija (1851–1852) © Tejt (2016) CC–BY–NC–ND 3.0 (Unported) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506 14. Andrej Tarkovski, Solaris, 1972, kadar iz filma 15. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, kadar iz videa 16. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, fotografija 17. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, fotografija 18. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, kadar iz videa 19. Jelena Jureša, Mira, skica za portret, 2010–2014, kadar iz videa 88

Literatura

— Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. [Bal, Mieke. „Putujući koncepti u humanistici: Vodič za pionire – Uvod”, TkH, br. 16 (Pravo na teoriju), str. 79–89. (odlomak)] — Deleuze, Gilles. Pourparlers 1972–1990. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990. [Delez, Žil. Pregovori 1972–1990, prev. s francuskog Andrija Filipović. Loznica: Karpos, 2010.] — Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. Prev. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. — Draaisma, Douwe. Forgetting. Myths, Perils and Compensations. Prev. Liz Waters. New Have: Yale University Press, 2015. — Hemon, Aleksandar. „To Understand Our Histories We Have to Narrate Our Catastrophies.” Lapham’s Quarterly. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/disaster/katastrofa — Liss, Andrea. Trespassing through Shadows. Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. — Patton, Paul. „Introduction.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ur. Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, str. 1–17. — Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia. Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf Canada, 2007. [Saks, Oliver. Muzikofilija: priče o muzici i mozgu, prev. s engleskog Jelena Stakić. Beograd: Clio, 2010.] — Schram, Laurence. Transport XX. Mechelen–Auschwitz. Brussel: VUBPress, 2008. — Steinberg, Maxime, Ward Adriaens and Laurence Schram (ur.). La destruction des juifs et des tsiganes de Belgique. Bruxelles: VUBPress, 2009. — Summerfield, Derek. „‘My Whole Body is Sick… My Life is Not Good’: a Rwandan Asylum Seeker Attends a Psychiatric Clinic in London.” Forced Migration and Mental Health: Rethinking the Care of Refugees and Displaced Persons. Ur. David Ingleby. London: Springer, 2006, str. 97–114. 89

— Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the End of Effect. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. — Vos, Chris. Bewegend verleden. Inleiding tot de analyse van films en televisieprogramma’s, Amsterdam: Boom, 2004. — Slavoj Žižek, Violence. Six Sideways Glances (London: Profile Books, 2009). 90 91 92

Sara Mendelson

Okean, čudo, čudnovato, buntovno 93

Kažeš, kada jednom nečemu damo ime, više ga nikada ne možemo posmatrati na isti način. Sve što se može imenovati nestaje, kopni, biva ubijeno. Kažeš da naš um pokušava sve da ukalupi… Ja tvrdim da su u imenu sadržani… obilje, kaleidoskopska pomeranja, preterivanje. Tvr- dim da reči čine više od imenovanja.1 —Megi Nelson, Argonauti

Nedavno sam dobila SMS poruku u kojoj mi dvoje prijatelja javljaju da su dobili bebu. Poslali su mi fotografiju: rumenoružičast smotuljak uvijen u ćebence. Odmah sam im odgovorila i pitala kako se dete zove. Fotografija nije bila dovoljna. Nije bilo važno to što ti prijatelji žive u drugoj zemlji i što će njihovo novorođenče možda već i prohodati pre no što ga prvi put budem videla. Nedostajao mi je propratni tekst uz fotografiju, da ga premećem po glavi, da ga spremno izgovorim prvom sledećom prilikom na Skajpu.

MIRA, skica za portret (2010–2014), autorke Jelene Jureše, razotkriva snagu kojom se ime opire tokovima istorije. Koristeći različite forme – dvokanalnu video-instalaciju, seriju fotografija, litografije i knjigu – Jureša prenosi biografiju svoje protagonistkinje na mahove, zastaj- kujući. Mirino ime, njegovi semantički i zvučni aspekti, u radu imaju ulogu interpunkcije. Imenovanje pruža jedan mogući metod za izraža- vanje odsustva, što pokazuje i moj odnos prema bebi mojih prijatelja koju još nisam upoznala.

Jonatan, odgovorili su mi prijatelji narednog dana. Upravo smo odlučili.

Jonatan: oslonac za našu potencijalnu bliskost u budućnosti.

1 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), str. 4. 94

U video-instalaciji Jelene Jureše, Miru upoznajemo putem isečenih i senovitih slika, soba i predela u kojima je možda boravila, te putem postojanog glasa naratora koji pripoveda na engleskom jeziku.2 Prvi video sadrži priču o Mirinim roditeljima, o njihovom odnosu pre njenog rođenja: njihovom jevrejskom i muslimanskom poreklu, njihovim životima u Bosni pre Drugog svetskog rata; njihovom upoznavanju u redovima partizana. Drugi deo videa pripovest nastavlja Mirinim ro- đenjem, njenim detinjstvom u Beogradu i selidbom u Sarajevo, uda- jom i preudajom, rođenjem dece; svim onim što je prethodilo njenoj smrti 1990. godine, „negde oko Pakraca. Upravo tu izbiće nemiri i na- stupiće haos koji će označiti početak rata u Hrvatskoj i raspad Jugosla- vije.” 3 Detalji lične biografije prepliću se s trenucima koji su obeležili istoriju dvadesetog veka na području jugoistočne Evrope: nastankom i raspadom Jugoslavije, uništenjem hiljada životâ u koncentracionim logorima. Prilikom svakog susreta, naracija ličnog i kulturna istorija međusobno se preispituju: ne postavljajući pitanje šta je snažnije ili značajnije već kako nam jedno pomaže da drugo spoznamo jasnije – ili pak manje jasno.

I u intimnoj pripovesti i u istorijskom narativu, imena nas mogu pod- setiti na ogromnu tenziju između perspektive drugog i trećeg lica. MIRA otelovljuje tu tenziju. Veći deo videa sadrži pripovedanje u tre- ćem licu, dok je Mira prisutna kao drugo lice, „ti” kojem se narator obraća. U drugom segmentu videa, narator otkriva da je on Mirin (ne- imenovani) sin. On time sebi pripisuje rodni identitet, pripadnost određenoj generaciji, emotivnu umešanost; „ja” koje se nalazi u ja- snom odnosu sa onim „ti”. Glas pripada Timu Kerslejku, nastavni- ku engleskog jezika koji je živeo u nekoliko zemalja, što se očituje i u njegovom govoru: on se odlikuje ležernom engleskom intonacijom,

2 U jednom razgovoru preko Skajpa, Jureša ističe sposobnost engleskog jezika da posluži kao esperanto. 3 Sve navode iz rada Mira, skica za portret preveo Igor Cvijanović. Prim. prev. 95

naizgled samouverenim izgovorom srpskih toponima. Njegov govor, koji se opire geografskom svrstavanju, u isti mah deluje udaljeno od događaja koje opisuje i blisko povezano s njima. Istovremeno udaljena i bliska, Mira lebdi između „ti” i „ona” (Mira).

Dopunjen titlovima koji s vremena na vreme imenuju scenu belim uglastim slovima („Bijeljina”, „Semlin Judenlager”, ili „1990”), glas nevidljivog pripovedača evocira trope društvenog dokumentarca ili istorijske fikcije. Za evropsku ili američku publiku, to su poznate kulturne forme kakve se sreću u kolektivnim sećanjima na događa- je iz Holokausta. U tom narativnom okviru, govor pripovedača odaje utisak nasleđene istorije i sledstvene upućenosti u događaje. On bez emocija objašnjava „neprestano i svakodnevno umiranje.” „Ti i tvoj mlađi brat odrastaćete zajedno. Nedostajaće ti pažnja. Uskraćena.”

Mirina pripovest u tesnoj je vezi s pripovestima njene zemlje i veka u kome živi. U isti mah, njena pripovest ne dozvoljava da je istorija proguta, te se zadržava na konkretnim, intimnim detaljima. Sećanja deluju u saglasju sa slikama, ali i nasuprot njima. U MIRI, slike ponekad služe kao okidači koji nagone na sećanje. („Fotografije umeju da naprave velike lomove u glavi. Moje uspomene počivaju na fotografijama.”) U radu Jelene Jureše, serija fotografija iz ličnih i porodičnih arhiva predstavlja sponu između različitih formi. Fotografije su shva- ćene kao nestalni dokumenti, koji se naizmence drže na odstojanju i razgledaju pod lupom.

Svesna si samo da je slika tvojih predaka jedina u tvom kadru, ovde, u staroj postojbini. Perere. Misliš na svog oca, na njegovu preranu smrt. Porodična istorija nagomilana i naprsla kao brana. Ovoga trena. Poplava.

U skladu sa fotografijama iz videa i nasuprot njima, pripovest Miri- nog sina ne samo što se zadržava na intimnim detaljima, već na njima 96

i počiva. Ne pokazujući nam kako su izgledali, on se priseća majčinih sitnih stopala, njenog nedokučivog osmeha, njene ljubavi prema po- zorištu. Shvata da se ne seća da je ikada vikala. („Da li znaš kako?”)

Rad Jelene Jureše pita se šta se događa kada se ova konkretna priča o konkretnim ljudima ukrsti s Holokaustom, ili sa imenima kao što su Jasenovac ili Loborgrad. Šta se događa s naracijom, s jezikom?

Publika koja reaguje kada čuje reč Holokaust možda neće na isti način reagovati na pomen Jasenovca ili Loborgrada. Narator pomaže da se popune praznine u asocijativnom sećanju, sažeto prepričavajući do- gađaje koji su se zbili u ovim logorima. On događaje prepričava svojim glasom, koristeći direktan jezik umesto direktnih slika. On nije svedok, već primalac imenâ.

U isti mah, MIRA poštuje takve razlike u perspektivi i sećanju. Rad ispituje koliko se značenja može pripisati imenu, ili šumskom prizoru, nazivu kao što je Jasenovac, čiji ispis uokviruje sliku. Šta budi više se- ćanja: šuma ili reč? Šta budi više sećanja, i u kome: logor Sajmište ili Se- mlin Judenlager?

U čitavoj instalaciji, slike, ponekad indirektno, služe i kao spomen. Za- mrznuta slika u suncem obasjanoj šumi obeležava mesto gde su se nekada, u strahu, skrivali proterani Srbi, Romi i Jevreji. Plesačica flamenka nastupa sama, okružena filmskom tminom, gledajući ravno u kameru dok počinje lagano da se kreće uz jugoslovensku muziku nabijenu emo- cijama.4 Kroz čitav video, plesačica ima ulogu drugog primaoca Miri- ne priče. Nakon što narator ispriča neke od najnasilnijih epizoda, video

4 Izvođačica pleše uz pesmu koju izvodi Jadranka Stojaković, poznata po svom než- nom glasu. Jureša: „Postoje rasprave o nastanku pesme. Jasno je da pesma ima elemente bosanske sevdalinke, ali Jadrankino izvođenje nosi novo osećanje, obeleža- va jedno vreme, i za pojedine, Jugoslaviju. To je pesma od odsustvu i čežnji.” 97

prikazuje nju kako stoji uspravno, širom otvorenih očiju, glave blago nagnute kao da osluškuje. Njena slika je suprotstavljena arhivskoj prirodi fotografija porodice Perera i filmskim prikazima prirode. Za razliku od naratora, Mirinog sina, nju ne možemo identifikovati, ali njena veza s pesmom Stojakovićeve i njena pozornost – te činjenica da je ona jedini živi izvođač koji se pojavljuje pred kamerom – nagoveštavaju da su oni na neki način možda saveznici. Opaža se tenzija između onoga što se može prikazati, onoga što se može nagovestiti i onoga što se može opisa- ti jezikom. Plesačica takođe ostaje neimenovana.

Do memorijalizacije dolazi kroz odsustvo, gledanjem u nešto drugo – to drugo nisu ostaci u pravom smislu, već izrazi onoga što je preostalo. Kao što ime može da upućuje na odsustvo, odsustvo imena može da nagove- sti da je nešto toliko blizu da izmiče izvan okvira svesnog pripovedanja.

MIRA je navela Jurešu da proputuje predelima prikazanim u radu. Njen metod putovanja i istraživanja odražava proces koji rad pobuđu- je u publici, kretanje između imenovanog i onoga što se opire imenovanju. MIRA internalizuje nepoverljivost prema imenovanju događa- ja iz Holokausta i nepoverljivost prema preteranoj uzdržanosti, nalik onoj koju izražava Đorđo Agamben (Giorgio Agamben). On navodi sle- deće: „Reći da je Aušvic „neizreciv” ili „nepojmljiv” jednako je pojmu euphemein, koji označava obožavanje u tišini, onako kako se divi bo- gu.” 5 Agamben se ovde ne zadržava na pitanju primaoca poruke: u njegovom tekstu, Aušvic nosi nesagledive, razorne asocijacije. No, moć takvog imena zavisi i od onoga ko ga izgovara, načina na koji je izgo- voreno i onoga kome je upućeno. Jureša istovremeno imenuje događa- je i pronalazi načine da izbegne imenovanje, svesna da ime ima moć da izrazi različita značenja – čak i u slučaju Mire, čiji je portret ispre- secan naizmeničnim etimologijama:

5 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), str. 32–33. 98

U svojoj knjizi Argonauti, Megi Nelson se priseća rasprave s partnerom oko intimne moći imena: da li imenovanje ograničava značenje tako što fiksira individualne percepcije u odnosu na znanje; ili je imenovanje „kaleidoskopsko”, utoliko što reči upotrebom postaju sve elastičnije, pa se značenja udvajaju, razlamaju, drugačije slažu u vremenu? Nelsonova korene svojih promišljanja nalazi kod Rolana Barta, koji piše sledeće:

Ogovaranje drugog svodi na on/ona, i to mi je svođenje nepodnošljivo. Za mene drugi nije ni on ni ona; drugi ima samo svoje sopstveno ime. Zamenica za treće lice je opaka zamenica: to je zamenica ne-osobe, ona udaljuje, ona poništava.6

6 Rolan Bart, Fragmenti ljubavnog govora, preveo s francuskog Aleksandar Miletić (Loznica: Karpos, 2011), str. 214. 99

Intimnost, pokazuje Bart, drži nas tako blizu da zamenice koje upu- ćuju na onog drugog postaju „nepodnošljive”. Bliskost se definiše ne- mogućnošću da se podnese odsustvo i pomisao da bismo mogli postati sećanja: „ne-ljudi”.

Promišljeno i s velikom pažnjom, Jureša spaja imena sa intimnim i istorijskim parametrima života. Ako ime služi kao sud u kome se čuva ono što preostaje, ovi sudovi su fleksibilni, duboko usađeni, duboko potisnuti. Višestruka značenja Mirinog vlastitog imena naglaša- vaju otvorenu prirodu percepcije i interpretacije. Zlaćano polje, vetar koji njime huji, penušavi vodopad. Porodična fotografija. TV sapunica. Mira (o kojoj god se etimologiji radilo) i fotografije okeana. Kolumbov okean: nepregledni označitelj, iz vremena pre kolonizacije, nabujao od mogućnosti. Mirin okean: čudnovat, buntovan. 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Una Popović

The Exhibition Reader: a “Study for a Portrait” 107

The volume before us is dedicated to the critical appraisal of an artwork by Jelena Jureša, titled Mira, Study for a Portrait, created over the course of several years (2010–2014). The book has been compiled and published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. The approaching exhibition created the need for a broader, more comprehensive analysis of the work, at the se- mantic, as well as the formal and visual level. The exhibition at the Sa- lon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade was the first solo exhibition of the integral work in Belgrade and Serbia. Prior to the Bel- grade exhibition, the work was presented at solo exhibitions in Zagreb, Pula and Graz, and another exhibition, in Osijek, is due towards the end of this year. It seems that Mira, Study for a Portrait is yet to grow and achieve its final form, to be further expounded and defined, but this was an opportunity to start, here and now, the engagement with the structure of the work, the use of documents, the nature of memory and the position of the gaze, about the author’s understanding of photography which, along with the narrated text, strives to create a sketch about the identity and the personality of one woman.

This is a book about Mira… but, by extension, it is also about Jelena.

Mira, Study for a Portrait is a pseudo-biographical multimedia work, which seeks to portray the life of an existing, yet anonymous woman named Mira, as well as her family, from the period preceding her 108

birth up to her tragic death. The structuring of (Mira’s) portrait is interesting, because the initial catalyst for the research is the need to tell a story. Through the revelation of the social circumstances and the private history of one family, Mira’s ancestors, but also of the intimate preoccupations of Mira herself, what emerges is insight into a personality, a psychological portrait of a woman.

The integral format of the work includes a video (two rather long video streams which are displayed as a two-channel installation), photographs and an artbook. The artbook, much like the film, is a collage. Due to the nature of its medium, it creates a more individual and more cryp- tic relationship between the image and the story, between the photography and the text. Each of these segments can act independently as a narrative unit, which, inter alia, reflects the unique character of Jureša’s work and her exhibits. Each of the segments is an independent installation, and each installation — a narrative about the gaze into memory. The intermediality inherent to the exhibition, the combination of photography and film, as well as the collage editing of the material in the film, which is made up of photographs from private archives, recent shots of scenery and interiors, accompanied by third-person narration followed by second-person narration, includes the juxtaposition of different perspectives and visions of memory, which are contrasted in the ebb and flow of the performative sequences of the selected material. Each fragment of the selected material implies complete control over “the gaze into memory”, in order to capture and reconstruct Mira’s fractured identity in the rhythmical fluctuations of temporal flow.

The work strives to historicize a chosen period in time (during and after the Second World War), the social circumstances in Yugoslavia, and the private life of a family; additionally, however, it functions and can be defined as sociological and psychological research. This is reflected in the two modes of production employed in the project. The first, formal one, refers to the methods used in organizing the 109

archives and challenging their role and their application (the author’s act of confronting the archive in the process of artistic creation, and our own, which we undertake in order to follow the narrative and gain insight into an individual). The second, psychological one, refers to the role of the author; in addition to her role as researcher and ar- chivist, the artist adopts the role of biographer, who sets out to engage her contemporaries, urged by the wish to create, to explain, to represent. Jureša seeks to side with a fellow human, a life which is small and “insignificant”; indirectly, however, in its reconstruction, she points to broader social and political issues. Mira… is a work which, on the one hand, can be read as ideologically motivated, and, on the other, as an intimate, “interior” and private exploration. In both cases, what lies beneath is the notion of disappearance and loss. Perhaps this is where the artist’s motivation lies, what enabled her to persevere with her research, in her aim to give a vivid illustration of the so-called Proustian paradox of memory.

In memory, we create associations with events, photographs, objects, but we also root our memories in spaces and places. Jureša’s research and her performative act of visiting various locations (Bihać, Saraje- vo, Jasenovac etc.) are highly notable. Creating a text that resembles a “travelogue”, the artist provides an outline of her travels to places of historic, disastrous and traumatic significance. Her goal is to discover and explore the past of her own country… on a quest for cultural memory. What is meant by this is the portion of cultural memory which is immobile rather than mobile — one needs to travel, to visit certain places of interest to gain direct access to a certain historical event. The process of such direct place mapping contributes to the interpretation of historical facts and the incremental increase of tension within memory itself. Unlike space which is constantly shifting and changing in relation to people and situations, its identity unstable and abstract, places of significance become marked and identifiable. Places are linked to human destinies and experiences, becoming individualized through 110

names and specific events. Jureša’s process of researching and confronting the nature of place and the events inscribed in the relevant to- pos can be defined as a unique and peculiar method in the creation of a portrait — of a subject at a distance. For it is precisely in the intention to vividly portray and explain someone’s nature that it becomes clear that the interpretation of a character, or a certain historical event, is at its most convincing when it relies on individual memories and narratives, rather than official documents or archives. As much as Mira, Study for a Portrait makes use of an actual archive, in the form of family photographs, the use of other types of material is much more prominent. Jureša, as the researcher and biographer, tries to breathe life into traces which are already dead. They can only be revived on the level of individual memory, never on the level of documented and precisely dated memory. This explains the transition to a so-called antemortem archive. Individual, “personal” memory is particularly foregrounded in the second part of the video, through second-person narration, where we come to realize that a son is speaking to his mother (Mira) — at the level of intimate description, we are confronted with subjective memory, which is, as such, always created in a dual process, through erasure, or forgetting, and through memory, or renewal. In fact, this is precisely the manner in which the work creates (only) a study for Mira’s portrait — in the interplay between memory and feeling. Mira, Study for a Portrait does not seek to convince the observer of its veracity, with regard to a person or a historical event (a point also made by Christel Stalpaert in her text), but rather offers a subjective description, which, through the process of telling the story and creating a representation, constructs a fragmented portrait of a certain time and a certain woman. When something is true, it becomes limited by a single reality; when we wish to reconstruct something, the history of an individual life strikes us as fractured and fragmented. It is up to the observers to discover the truth, to face their own share of memory, to transform oblivion into remembering, in order to preserve someone or something from the passage of time and to view it through Mira — as a metaphor. 111

***

In Mira, Study for a Portrait, the analysis shifts from the general to the particular, zooming in on the details that form part of a wider whole; similarly, the texts before us analyse and focus on particular segments in the work. In addition to reflecting the authors’ personal impressions about the work, each of the texts can be perceived as a suggestion for a new approach, for another way of reading and understanding Mira.

The text by Branka Benčić offers a rich, multi-layered analysis and begins with the spatial description of the exhibition. By analysing the use of photography and film, and a certain remediation the artist implements in the work, Benčić engages with Jureša’s exploration of the past and her interpretation of time. Christel Stalpaert focuses on the description of the non-material aspects of the work, such as the relationship between sound and silence in the film, the absence and presence in the photographs. Sarah Mendelsohn discusses the etymology of names and the meanings which both the name and what it names contain with regard to the historical context. Finally, the correspondence, the “written conversation” between Aneta Stojnić and Jelena Jureša, equally merits attention, as it provides an insight into the artist’s original decision to produce the work, invites an exploration of historical revisionism in contemporary artistic practice, but also offers an interesting perspective on matri- linear genealogy and the relations between male and female in the work.

As an act of critical reading, this collection of texts offers a unique representation of a period in history and a portrait of a woman. However, this is achieved by means of a reversed perspective with regard to the work itself — moving from the particular to the general. This points to the richness of the work and its broad interpretative potential. Ulti- mately, the volume before us contributes to another goal — it provides an overview of different perspectives on Mira, Study for a Portrait, but it also provides a study for an artistic portrait of Jelena Jureša. 112 113 114

Branka Benčić

Double Exposure — A Collision of Past and Present

* The essay was first published on the occasion of solo exhibition by Jelena Juresa at KM Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst&Medien, Graz (January 31 – March 5, 2015). 115

Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life.1

Whether we have had a direct encounter with the past based on our own memories, or it is shaped as mediated memory, through storytelling, modes of oral history, movies, or photographs, one’s opinions and attitudes toward the past are being revisited and reshaped in the present. In this way, social and collective “remembering of the past” is not only the result of facts and direct experience but also works as a narrative construction subject to individual reconsiderations. It is a process of reflexive understanding of the past, based on personal construction and the reinterpretation of (auto)biographical memory. By establishing a link with the past mostly through images as tools of memory, artists attempt to understand and define the time in which we are living.

The processes of undoing fixed understandings point to questions raised by ideas whose meaning is articulated in the gap between past and present. The image of nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym points out, is one of double exposure — a collision of the past and the present, illusion and reality.2

Artistic research into archives and an interest in historiographical practices question the ways of constructing the past, becoming the catalysts for the large number of artworks within contemporary artistic production. This entails opening up new perspectives and constituting new meanings, dealing with the past through different

1 W. G. Sebald in conversation with Maya Jaggi, “The Last Word”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities. highereducation (accessed February 2015). 2 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 116

forms of archives as tools for reconstructing history; events and texts are conceived as a space for the preservation of memory. It is about the archive as a critical methodology, constituting meaning, explain- ing how the meaning is redefined and how the circumstances of a discourse are recontextualised through memory.

To borrow images, stories, practices, and aesthetics from the past is often to create different narrative methodologies and to build bridges with the present, but also to raise awareness of alternative or marginal- ised narratives.3 Katerina Gregos points out the position of the “artist as historian”, while Hal Foster underscores “archival artists” who seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.4

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.5

Similar to the quest for identity in the novel Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the video installation MIRA, Study for a Portrait (2010–14) by Jelena Jureša explores the quest for individual identity and the battle against amnesia among the shreds of memory. Jureša’s work is informed by the practices of the artist as historian and the archival artist. She embarks on a quest that attempts to re-create and reconstruct a historical narrative of one very unique individual, and relatively anonymous human life, giving it a voice and unveiling series of events and circumstances that are linked around it. In this way, MIRA, Study for a Portrait illustrates the intimate exploration of the boundaries of memory. “It is the story of one woman, one family, one country, and three wars” — as the artist explains.6

3 Katerina Gregos, “Is the Past Another Country?”, Manifesta Journal, http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/fungus-contemporary/past-another- country (accessed February 2015). 4 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, in October, 110 (Autumn 2004), pp. 3–22. 5 James Joyce, “Eveline”, in Great English Short Stories (Stuttgart: Klett, 1979). 6 Jelena Jureša, artist’s statement. 117

Mira, in Sanskrit, means the ocean, the sea…

It is in still frames, frozen images, representations of the sea and the marine landscape that MIRA, Study for a Portrait opens up before our eyes, bringing before us affective, immersive, and overwhelming images. We feel like we are submerged in the darkness of the space where the projection is taking place — the gallery space. And we feel like we are experiencing the work of art not only consciously but by “osmosis”, through the skin. The scenes follow one another in silence, at first. After a few moments a voice-over narration begins, breaking the initial silence, over time unfolding the realistic narrative that it is based on truth constructed from memory, history, and documents.

The work is constituted as a travelogue that documents an imaginary, impossible journey in which we can experience haunting travel through space and time — landscapes, countries, ideologies, war — in a slow stream of images that float before our eyes: the Balkans throughout the twentieth century, in war and peace, marking the long history of tragedies, violence, different ethnicities, the Second World War, and the complex history of Yugoslavia. The installation ends by fading out and giving a premonition of dissolution, where Mira’s death in a car accident acts as a sharp cut — ending the life events, embodying the violent break that concludes the story.

The narrative follows the lives of Mira and her family from the period before her birth to her tragic death, using a variety of visual material and strategies — ranging from borrowed archival photographs taken from the family album to images from popular culture, newly recorded landscape scenes, video footage, and photographs. They revive the family history of Mira’s ancestors. 118 119

Mira, in Slavic, means peace…

The second part of the video installation begins by marking the end of the Second World War, the constitution of the new country, and the introduction of Mira to the story. Although the formative interest is on the character of Mira, she does not emerge until the second half of the work, when the narrative focal point, the point of view, is strategically shifted.7 Through such structuring, Jelena Jureša has established a wide and deliberately fragmented historical and contextual framework for the events preceding Mira’s life (in the first part of the installation), displaying a number of fragments of personal and collective histories and tragic fates.

The exhibition is shaped as a constellation of fragments, bringing together different formats — an artist’s book, a series of photographs, moving-image based works — and thus staging a dialogue between images and text. The monumental and absorbing two-channel film installation of feature-length quality occupies central stage and or- chestrates different elements of the work structured around it, exploring its narrative, exposing gathered material. It is by similar ac- tions of unfolding and reading the book and watching the film that we grasp the text and images brought before us.

The central part, structured as a large-scale installation, invites the observer to dive in and follow the fate of this anonymous woman. Guided by the impulsive research of archives and stories, unique poetics and the sensibility of the artist, haunting and delicate, the work reflects both a human life and a century, “a single individual’s life

7 Mira was the mother of the artist’s husband, born in 1946 and killed in a car crash in 1990. 120

and a collective historical period — the backbone of this age is shat- tered”.8 It is almost as if the entire fragmented century, historical events as pieces of its official historiography, were reflected in a series of small, individual, private, and invisible historic moments that are hidden and forgotten along the margins of existence. The cracks and fractures reflect differences in the relationships and the concept of time — the lifetime of the individual, and time as a time in history in general.9 It is between two conceptions of time — historical and subjective time, private and public — that lies the time of the work.

In MIRA, Study for a Portrait, Jelena Jureša deconstructs and reconstructs her portrait of Mira as a twofold process, taking into consideration, on the one hand, notions of the portrait as a fixed and coded art-historical genre, a complete, executed object, while on the other hand, in “a study for a portrait”, the artist underscores the process of building identity. Constructed by means of language and representation, identities represent not stable unity, but rather a shifting thread of ideological positions built as a temporary meeting point of subjects and codes on the cross- roads of different social formations and personal histories.

Jelena Jureša engages in the act of narration and employs the voice of the narrator — along with archival and newly recorded photographic images and video segments as the conceptualisation of a kind of travel through the “fabric of space and time” — as if they were acting as a memento of an imaginary journey, as a quest for meaning, and as an attempt to contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of melancholy.

8 See Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben on the poetry of Osip Mandelstam: Alain Badiou, “The Beast”, in The Century (Malden, MA, and Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 17, and Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”, in What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 41–43. 9 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”, in What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 41–43. 121 122 123

While the voice of the narrator unfolds the extensive biographical story about the history and the pre-history of Mira and her family over several generations, in the meantime the visual part sees the slow exchange of images. We are aware of mostly two kinds of image streams that follow one another in a parallel montage: archival family photographs and extensive landscape footage, still and moving, as frozen frames and video that document nature, framed closely or at a distance, mapping the territory of former Yugoslavia — rivers, woods, flowers, sky, butterflies, waterfalls… In long shots that point to the aspect of the scene’s dura- tion, the landscapes are emptied of human presence. Jelena Jureša re- turned to selected locations in order to explore this encounter with the past, keeping in mind that the landscape may have possibly remained the same, with an openness to seeing and witnessing the same land that was viewed with different eyes in times past. Such images do not liter- ally follow the narrative in order to illustrate the story but are meant to create a parallel visual universe, while almost simultaneously rais- ing awareness or distracting us or functioning as stitches to intensely bind us while immersing us in linearity. They also underscore the un- easiness felt and depart from common perception, generating multi- plicity and associative fields, while reminding us that the artwork is a complex fragmentary structure, where the relationship between form and content might be considered loose, almost arbitrary, but is in fact researched and well thought through by the artist. Segments of silence, the pausing narrative, in exchange with the voice of the narrator are strategically shaped to form dramaturgical points of suspense and tension, feelings of emptiness in contrast with factographic storytelling.

The second section introduces a closer focus on female characters, mostly aspects of their personal details. The private life of Mira and intimate, personal stories take up the majority of the narrative space. It also introduces images of interiors for the first time. Interiors are usually understood as private places of female identity, while public spaces are considered to be realms of male authority. Throughout 124

its length, the work is structured in dichotomies: interior and exteri- or, private and public, sound and silence. This exchange between document and landscape, culture and nature, is at times interrupted by the presence of a female character, an unexpected appearance isolat- ed against a black background — a flamenco dancer, a mirage, a dream sequence, a ghost, a substitute, a witness… Along with footage from the 1958 feature film La Violetera, this contributes to sensations of es- capism and elements of the surreal. In the words of Walter Benjamin, it implies “a space informed by human consciousness that gives way to space informed by the unconscious”.10

Immersive landscape scenes play a role in creating a “landscape of memory”. They alternate with various forms of photographic images, from the family archive of photos, to pictures of interiors, to images from the film, creating a collision at the meeting point of static and moving images. Through different media Jelena Jureša explores the complex relationship where culture, history, memory, the individual, and society intersect. Landscape as a model of the human conceptualisation of nature serves to reflect different moods and complex relationships; it becomes a place of questioning the relationships of space, history, memory, and identity. Representational models are created based on various fragments — layers from the immediate en- vironment, elements of daily life, myths, stories, parts of history, culture, all of which build and shape the process of thought and perception, corresponding to the sociopolitical and historical context, while at the same time reflecting the internal situation, experience, history, or story. The work of art constitutes a new symbolic space imply- ing some sort of epistemology of oblivion and reconstruction of the horizon. Throughout the work discussed here is the technique of the demontage of the intimate and ordinary relations connecting the real

10 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 266. 125

and the imaginary, the visible and the invisible, exploring the tensions between dominant and underrepresented narratives.

The film is described … as a chameleon and the figure of the artist as a secretary of the invisible. But it also works in reverse. The artist is the chameleon and film is the secretary of the invisible.11

The video installation unfolds before us as an encounter with the past, with history. It creates a specific relationship to the past, where different narratives coexist simultaneously — a historicised plot, elements we perceive as romanticised or fiction-like, which in reality they are not. The field of melancholy that is shaped according to physical and temporal distances is a place where memory, time, history, interpretation, and imagination meet, where meaning is deeply rooted in the collective memory. These poetic and melancholic spaces become constant motifs of artistic interest, describing the ineffable and articulating visual language as a transfer between the subconscious and the visual, the image, while the flow of moving images draws us into the associative spaces that we may perceive as reality or fiction. With the use of photographic and video recordings, still and moving images, negotiating between the document and the dreamlike or surreal, Jelena Jureša examines historical positions, questions of truth, identity, memory, trauma, and loss. She highlights the artist’s almost instinctive need to discover a reality that is lost, doing so by processes of its reconstruction. The installation is re- vealed to us as a place of “impossible encounter” that embodies specific connections with the past, a “missed encounter with the real”.12

11 Marine Hugonnier in conversation with Anne-Sophie Dinant, “Marine Hugonnier: The Secretary of the Invisible”, Vdrome, http://www.vdrome.org/ hugonnier.html (accessed February 2015). 12 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 134. 126

Photography is closely associated with loss, claims George Bak- er; like an image of disappearance, it is a trace of the events that fade out and vanish before our eyes and from our memories. “It is a passionate embrace, to an object that is in fact gone, a connection staged around loss. For photography, this has always been the medium’s central condition, but it is a paradox we can only fully sense today, as the medium itself has been subjected to its own processes of death.” 13

On the other hand, the medium of video supports an extended temporal dimension of an image, for the purpose of the fictionalisa- tion of time and space, to create scenes that fix our gaze or to enable dreamlike qualities in the work — qualities which, according to Gilles Deleuze, belong to pure optical characteristics, deprived of action, presenting ways of visualising time.14 The time, acquiring the characteristic of “liquid” (as liquid time), seems to be suspended between past and present, oscillating between reality and dream. In relation to works following such unique qualities, Fredric Jameson explains that video “is the only art or medium in which this ultimate seam between space and time is the very locus of the form.”15

In the continuous flow of still and moving images, it is in the place and moment of their junction that emotional tension between the fictional space of the story and the physical space they occupy takes shape, enveloping the viewer in the darkness of the projections.

13 George Baker, “Some Things Moyra Taught Me”, Frieze, 130 (April 2010), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/some_things_moyra_taught_me/ (accessed February 2015). 14 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). 15 Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious”, in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 76. 127

The seam that connects the parts of a work of art is established by the fluidity of language, the flow of images, and filmic techniques.

Photography and video use their specific capabilities to record reality, to play back, rewind, pause, and stop time, a variety of conceptual and media tools and processes involved in the preservation of images and events, where the photograph itself is conserved as a representation of memory. These mediums are among the most appropriate for the deployment of narrative strategies upon which historical subject matter relies, and we consider lens-based practices to be records of things that were registered in the past tense.16

Jelena Jureša places the appropriation of existing images, as well as their transfer and the processes of their mediation, at the centre of her interests — narrative and symbolic interests, but also those based on artistic and media research. The work that represents an image of an image, representation of representation, explores preserved scenes — such as the photograph itself — and is based on the appropriation of still and moving images: film/video, photography, frozen frames, video footage. These are fragments from the family albums, repre- senting a private archive, recomposed, already framed scenes from bleached, faded-out photographs. Frozen in time, they witness the passage of time inscribed in the “found”, old, or new images of an almost archival character. They present a certain melancholy, like an impossible encounter with the past.17

16 Katerina Gregos, “Is the Past Another Country?”, Manifesta Journal, http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/fungus-contemporary/past-another- country (accessed February 2015). 17 George Baker, “Some Things Moyra Taught Me”, Frieze, 130 (April 2010), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/some_things_moyra_taught_me/ (accessed February 2015). 128

The resulting procedures of mediation — the process of transfer- ring images from one medium to the other — becomes crucial in the structure of the work. It connects it with the past (of and through the media of mechanical reproduction of the image), emphasising a temporal dimension, the dimension within which a representation of the process of disappearance becomes possible. The dimension of disappearance, or the process of dematerialisation, irreducible to the image of death, is represented by the transfer.18

The book Death 24× a Second by Laura Mulvey explores the role that new media technologies play in our experience of film, through re- flections on stasis, punctum, life, death, and the digital disruption of linearity. Situating cinema’s prehistory in photography and post-cinema in the digital realm, Death 24× a Second brings the photographic still to the surface of cinema. The paradox between movement and stasis has haunted cinema from its earliest inception. In reference to stillness and the photograph, Mulvey discusses attempts to grasp various issues: the paradox of time, Roland Barthes’s this was now and André Bazin’s time embalmed as conceptions of the photograph as a record of the past reaching towards the future, the photographic index, a trace that, while signifying death, has a take on the future.19 In the same way that cinema was considered to give life to dead things, digital technology is now seen as giving new life to cinema, which is, par- adoxically, haunted by death.

The process exchange of influences between culture, media, and history works in two ways. New media redefine the old, but they are also subject to the influence of more dated media. Marshall McLuhan’s

18 Leonida Kovač, “Nepoznat netko”, in Ivan Faktor: Fritz Lang und Ich 1994–2004 (Zagreb: Gliptoteka HAZU, 2004), p. 22. 19 Laura Mulvey, Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 129

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man explains that the content of any media is another media. Further, theorists define remediation, as the process by which new media technologies improve the flaws of earlier technologies. They point out a specific form of the transformation of the media, considered in a wide loop of relations that we refer to as strategies of representation, since what is at stake is a representation of one medium by another. On the one hand, the phenomenon is a transparent immediacy that seeks to “hide” the process of remediation in making a medium invisible, while on the other, there is a form of (hyper)mediation that is making visible the very process of remediation, a representation of one medium by another.20

MIRA, Study for a Portrait develops as an immersive two-part video installation that dominates the gallery space, followed a by a series of images and an the eponymous artist book. Their narrative is not linear but rather structured in fragments. Projections are sep- arated as spatial elements in the gallery. It is in these gaps and rup- tures, in between screens, that a new meaning of the work is shaped, sometimes impossible to articulate verbally, but explored as a specific experience.

In multichannel video installations, multiplications of screens, and projected images, the dislocation (displacement) and the destabili- sation of the fixed conditions of the viewer become ways of focusing our attention on the surrounding atmosphere and experiencing the work itself, its exhibition, reception, and the complex relationships of the contemporary subject in mediatised space and time.21 This “deictic turn” in the recent production of artists’ moving image

20 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 21 Alison Butler, “A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary Gallery Film and Video”, in Screen 51, vol. 4 (2010), pp. 305–23. 130

production sees the projections as an event and the location of the projection as referential space. It points to the aesthetics and the practice of cinematic constructions, to the formation of subjective environments, to feelings of insecurity, and to the instability of the subject.22

The notions of “seductive immateriality” and “mimetic engulfment”, used for describing gallery video installations, are characteristic features of image flow in contemporary visual culture. Multimedia installations develop new audiovisual forms by creating a fresh context in the production of subjectivity. Film and video installations in galleries emancipate the observer from the limitations of traditional cinema. A gallery projection is creating different spatial and temporal connections and disjunctions. Multiple screens represent spaces of discontinuity based on fractures and gaps between the screens/images, and the viewer is placed exactly there, among these fissures, physically present. For the observer immersed in a new space, it intensi- fies the embodied experience.

***

Today, the space between the visual arts and traditional cinematog- raphy is so saturated with crossovers and hybrid genres that it is impossible to trace clear boundaries between them. While some artists work with existing material through appropriation, with found footage/cinema as a kind of ready-made, others engage in the endless possibilities of film and installation, working with codes and conventions of institutions of art and cinema and exhibiting works in galleries. Since the artistic practices of expanded cinema in the late 1960s, the context of cinema as a conceptual, ideological, and institu- tional infrastructure in which films are exhibited has become a part

22 Ibid. 131

of the critical discourse that relates to the institutions of cinema, archives, or museums, and it participates in the articulation of the on- tological and cultural status of artistic production. In the context of such artistic practices, contemporary art seems to play a role in the parallel history and the future of moving images, a space to research the possibilities and boundaries of new cinematographic forms.

Gallery films are hybrid forms placed between the institutions of cinema and galleries, questioning their conventions and anticipating some new media practices. They record their historical location between media forms, formats, and institutions, their intricate relationship, by working through the dynamics of space and time.23

Formed at the intersection of spaces of contemporary art and cinema, artistic moving images are a specific cinematic practice in between the systems of art and cinema, borrowing from different genres and practices: from experimental, documentary, or auteur cinema, with influences of installation and video art, performance, or photography — transforming itself into a slippery field of moving image practice without fixed definitions. Absorbing different practices and -tak ing on a specific form of “narrative” video, artists are engaging with elaborate and complex cinematic relations and structures, layering dramaturgy and video image processing. The archive of photographic and filmic images of the twentieth century as part of the collective memory is maintained in the various works of artists, pointing to the role of contemporary art in establishing connections with history. Artists are using narratives that involve a reflection of the social or cultural context to create visually impressive works that feature

23 Branka Benčić, “Cinemaniac X: Curating Moving Images”, in Cinemaniac X (Pula: MMC Luka, 2011), and Branka Benčić, “Think Film. Think Cinema. Think Exhibition. Think Film Festival (not necessarily in that order)”, in Cinemaniac/ Think Film (Pula: MMC Luka, 2013). 132

cinesthetic qualities and an atmosphere of tension and melancholy engaging with film-making procedures and production conditions. The content of these works often represents a conceptualisation of travel across space and time and fields of imagination, shaping new worlds — known or imaginary. Images and stories in contemporary artistic films, videos, or video installations are immersive and poeti- cal, exploring visual codes and cinematic language to foster complex relations between an individual and society. 133 134 135 136

Jelena Jureša Aneta Stojnić

Mira_ correspondence 137

Subject: Mira_correspondence Date: Monday, March 3, 2016, 5:06 PM From: Jelena Juresa To: Aneta Stojnic

Dear Aneta,

Engaging in this kind of correspondence requires me to adopt a dual perspective: to address You, as the direct recipient of the message, but also to bear in mind the future readers of this text. I go back and forth between the now and the forthcoming then, and realize that this allows me to exist even before I have created the narrative of my work in progress.

How do I construct the text to make it intimate and yet interesting to someone who is not You — this is just one of the questions that emerge and delay the beginning of my writing. It is interrupted by a friend asking for advice: she has received a job offer in Belgium. I am wary of giving a definitive answer about this country, about its people, the weather. Since we moved to Belgium, I have been trying to find time to reread W. G. Sebald: every time I see the Palace of Justice in Brussels, or the Antwerp railway station, I think of Austerlitz. And now, as I am choosing the photographs for the reader, I find the butterfly, “the same” photo shot in Bihać, Jasenovac, on the Sutjeska. However, I became aware of the possible reference to Sebald’s fascination with insects, moths and butterflies in particular, only after I finished working on “Mira”. I have read somewhere that it was not transformation as such that appealed to him, the transfiguration of these animals into winged creatures. Instead, he marvelled at what follows — at their inaudible disappearance. 138

On Mar 10, 2016, at 0:05 AM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Dear Jelena,

The duality of our correspondence is indeed twofold: it is both temporal, ranging between the present and the future, and spatial, caught between the private and the public. This is by no means accidental. The convergence of past and future, the nonlinear movement through the “achronic” time of the video-installation, but also the tensions between the private and the public, between family life and historical context, between history, historicization and memory, between the impermanent and the indelible, between “nature” and construction (nature is construction?), between the personal and the political… these are the immediate layers of your work which the audience, the viewer and the reader, encounter. It seems that it is precisely from these tensions, breaches and intersections that all further critical questions emerge. The detailed study for a portrait makes an unequivocal, ruthless demand on its recipients: it requires them to position themselves historically and politically. 139

Who is Mira?

On Mar 15, 2016, at 11:18 PM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Dear Aneta,

Not even this can be answered in straightforward terms. Mira did exist, born out of the breaking point in which her parents’ lives met, at the centre of historical and political upheavals. For this reason, her existence was always fragile, struggling under the weight of a repressed family tragedy: the past she inherits as the daughter of the only surviving member in a family of Bosnian Jews, killed in the Holocaust, is a horrific one. The deaths of the Pereras chart a map, starting with the Sajmište concentration camp, followed by Đakovo and Loborgrad, ending at Jasenovac. On the other hand, Mira’s life can be perceived as a miracle, as a framework that allows us to peer deeper into the period that, incidentally, miraculously coincided with the absence of war and the existence of a country.

On Mar 19, 2016, at 3:20 AM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Dear Jelena,

Your approach to working with visual material is highly individual, as is the way in which you merge together the language of film and the “storytelling” format in this video-installation. You use archives and historical sources, you play with the meanings of interiors and exteriors, with the interaction of history, culture and nature (which is no less constructed). Nature is never uncorrupted and there is no neutral space or landscape — each is drenched, saturated, fed, parched or sown with 140

multiple layers of history. From a dramaturgical perspective, you allow your audience to put together their own story using the two channels of the video-installation, and as we are watching one of the videos, we remain aware of the presence of the other, like a background voice, like a memory.

The “miracle”, the “miraculousness” you refer to with regard to Mira’s life and the historical period it coincides with sounds almost like a line paraphrased from Brecht’s “Mother Courage”: war is the natural state of mankind, peace is simply a hiatus between wars.

Perhaps now is a good time to raise the following question: what sort of narrative do you offer as an artist through your installation, what is the hegemonic narrative that you engage with? How do you see your position as an artist in the process of historicization? In other words, what politics is generated by the strategies you use to dramatize the exchanges between your visual and textual narratives?

On Mar 19, 2016, at 9:56 PM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Dear Aneta,

The storytelling level, as it were, relies on the memories and testimonies of people whose lives are entwined with the events outlined in the work, some of which are portrayed in the work itself. I thought it was critical to represent personal histories in the context of national history, of the unique temporal vacuum created during the existence of Yugoslavia. Initially, we might engage with the biography of one woman, one country, with the chronicle of an era. However, this is an illusion, because the geography of time in the work is so distinctive. Even though the photographs and the video material highlight the places the audience revisits as they watch the video-installation, their meaning is complemented by new developments 141

(and histories). The fragility of the moment, the vulnerability of places whose innocence cannot survive — these led me to create a framework in which I can explore my own personal feelings of loss, the void we have been breathing since the collapse of Yugoslavia.

The time frame of the narration begins with 1492. This year is central to tracing the genealogy of the family. In addition, it is the key temporal reference for engaging with the history of migration and genocide. In this year, by the decree of Queen Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the Sephardic Jews were exiled from Spain. It is also the year when, under the generous patronage of the Spanish crown, Columbus set off on his most important voyage. This is a harrowing historical moment, in which two trajectories clash and merge: the exile and migration of the Spanish Jews, and the long history of persecution and genocide in America.

Regardless of the extent to which an “archive” imposes the perspective of looking back, I believe that it is necessary to rethink the archive in order to understand the present and the power relations that lead to a specific moment which is eventually recognized as historical. The turn of the twentieth century brought an increasing critical questioning of the archive in the humanities and, in turn, the extent of its performative use in artistic practice. The need to “cite” archives seems logical — there is certain comfort to be derived from dwelling in the “known” — the archive seemingly allows us to avoid confronting the present and creates an illusion of critical investment. This approach is of no interest to me, because I believe in critique, which does not have to be obvious in order to be intelligent.

History is indeed a battlefield, insensitive to racism and the absence of female voices. One may ask what constitutes a document, worthy of a place in an archive. Lately, I have developed a growing interest in the work of Rebecca Schneider, who compares the archive to a score, or script, in which photography is the dominant element. From that perspective, we 142

can reread the development of photography as a medium, and explore the performativity of the archive as its central feature. Has the curation of archives made photography redundant, and nowadays even quite dull at times, or has photography always been their integral part? This is the question I am currently trying to get my head around.

It seems important to stress that this work challenges the medium itself as well as its role. My interest in photography is phenomenological. In this respect, playing with the idea of its “veracity” is of great importance to me. The media of photography and film are by no means innocent — they provided a portrait of the twentieth century. Even though they are in fact historically quite distant, events appear close, and we get the impression that we are familiar with them, we have constructed memories of them. Naturally, such mediat(iz)ed memory of the twentieth century marginalizes all Other voices. Since its inception, photography has been intimately linked with colonialism and imperialism, employed as a means of constructing patterns in the nascent disciplines of biological and physical anthropology. Photographs of non-Europeans, along with groupings carefully choreographed around different ethnic backgrounds, were commonplace in the work of explorers and anthropologists. Scientific studies written at the time became the basis for racial theories, whereas photography became part of a show, a carefully staged choreography passing for a chronicle of people and places, spreading the myth of “other races” and their “natural habitat”. To a great extent, photography and film are responsible for the production of forgetting. For this reason, my relationship with these media is highly complex, in essence logical, and the only one possible from my perspective.

In “Mira, Study for a Portrait”, photography is indeed central and may be perceived as a score written alongside the text, where image generates text and vice versa (the Serbian language lacks a word that would encompass the entire range of meanings included in the notion of “image” — the broader and deeper senses of the word). The vast majority of stills in the video show nature, the key places that puncture the narrative. These images were shot 143

mostly in Bosnia, on locations ranging from Bihać and the River Una, to the River Sutjeska, where the scenery is ruthlessly beautiful. I wanted to juxtapose this beauty to the narrative, which is just ruthless. The trajectory of my travels was dictated by the underlying narrative, constructed from collected and opposing memories, the historical events that were the focus of the research, extensive resources on the war and testimonies from the survivors.

I am reminded of the words of Michel de Certeau, which echo like a mantra (Every story is a travel story — a spatial practice).1 As I write to you, I realize that for me this sentence manages to convey deeper meaning only when I read it in English. What is more — now there’s a coincidence — this is a sentence formulated by the translator. When I transform it into my language, it loses its power of insight, the moment it is uttered or written. In that respect, language is a very strange vehicle indeed.

On Mar 20, 2016, at 3:55 PM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Dear Jelena,

You say:

> The need to “cite” archives seems logical — there is certain comfort to be derived from dwelling in the “known” — the archive seemingly allows us to avoid confronting the present and creates an illusion of critical investment. This approach is of no interest to me, because I believe in critique, which does not have to be obvious in order to be intelligent.

I believe it is important to understand the relationship between archive and memory, between the different processes and politics of historicization,

1 Tout récitest un récit de voyage, — unepratique de l’espace (French). 144

and the explicit as well as the implicit engagements with the contemporary readings of history.

The archive is by no means a passive container, an objective or neutral repository of history, dealing only with history, concerned only with history — quite the contrary, the archive dictates and controls the way in which history will be read, which means it shapes current political reality. According to Derrida, the process of archivization “produces as much as it records the event”. In this respect, the power over memory is the power exerted over identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks to establish what its core values are, where they once lay; in the process, memory becomes the site in which social power is negotiated, where it is confronted, contested or confirmed. The establishment of memory results in the establishment of narratives which have an inevitable ideological dimension in the contemporary context. Precisely for this reason, the space of memory must never cease to be critically reassessed, deconstructed and reconstructed.

Mira’s story is told by you (that is, second-hand), as the narrator, the one who provides a draft, the one who observes, speculates and selects. My impression is that you are perfectly aware of the responsibility that you bear as the one who relates the story. Can the pseudo-personal approach, relying on the individual history of one woman, be understood as a micro- intervention in contemporary public discourse? (Perhaps this is what you mean when you write of critique which does not need to be obvious.)

I would like to know how these engagements change depending on the different contexts in which the work is exhibited?

An important part of the historical narrative that you relate deals with the Second World War, the Holocaust, the anti-fascist People’s Liberation Struggle of the Partisan movement, victory and liberation from the Nazi occupation, and eventually, the foundation of a new state, the SFRY. 145

During our first public discussion of “Mira, Study for a Portrait”, held in Graz (Halle für Kunst & Medien, February 2015), we raised the question of Austria’s role in the Second World War, and its subsequent failure to confront its Nazi past even after several decades, which stems from the official position that Austria was “Hitler’s first victim”. The consequences of such politics are reflected in contemporary issues regarding (structural) racism and antisemitism, which is why it was important to raise this issue on that occasion, in this particular local context.

What questions do you expect “Mira” to raise in Belgrade in 2016? What sort of intervention in public discourse is effected through a favourable representation of the Partisan movement in times of historical revisionism?

On Mar 21, 2016, at 9:28 AM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Dear Aneta,

As you say, “the space of memory must never cease to be critically reassessed”. This is why it is essential to reconsider and stay aware of one’s own position, to ask the following: “In engaging with the discourse of memory, do we facilitate forgetting; in other words, which memories are highlighted, and which fade into the background?” Let us take a moment to return to the discussion of the archive and to Rebecca Schneider, who expresses a concern that our critical engagement with memory stems from the nature of the archive and its solidity. I would like to rephrase your earlier question, without the possibility of a straightforward answer: “what hegemonic narrative do I/we engage with, if there is a possibility that we belong to the same (constructed) theatrical arena?”

Much has been written about the present which is steeped in memories — the “memory boom” — ranging from the view that ever since the turn 146

of the century we have been living in a time of commemoration, to the writing of Andreas Huyssen, who suggests that, even though they can be observed globally, discourses of memory are essentially associated with the individual histories of specific nations and states. In his analysis of the present oversaturation with memory, Huyssen calls for a re-evaluation of the juxtaposition between the obsession with memory and the culture of amnesia. He argues that there is no point in contrasting memory with amnesia; instead, one should be understood with regard to the other. In the obsession with memory and the past, he identifies the danger of descending into the destructive dynamics of forgetting. He further suggests that, even though we are living in the post-Auschwitz era, any future engagement with the discourse of memory must look ahead. The future will not blame us for forgetting, but it will judge us because, despite remembering perfectly well, we did not act in accordance with the memory — this idea is clearly illustrated in the present moment. We might raise the issue of the power(lessness) of memory practices after the Holocaust, in this very fragile moment, when fascism is proving its vitality on the European continent.

When it comes to this region, one might ask how generations that have no direct experience of the years before the breakup of Yugoslavia will remember the twentieth century. The schizophrenic revisions that have been gaining ground in the new national states after the wars of the nineties would be comical if they weren’t dangerous.

You say

> Mira’s story is told by you (that is, second-hand), as the narrator, the one who provides a draft, the one who observes, speculates and selects. My impression is that you are perfectly aware of the responsibility that you bear as the one who relates the story.

It is true that I work within the limits of the real, without taking an interest in the documentary, and that the space of my artistic practice observes 147

its own laws. I work with people and real events, memories, history and the critique of that history, yet I prefer not to map the precise position from which I create. I leave that to the critics and the curators, for several reasons. They will, second-hand, write about what interests them, first- hand, in my work. Then again, their second-hand testimonies will probably be much more precise, much closer to the truth, than the first-hand ones I can provide now. I am afraid that the exact reasons for engaging with “Mira, Study for a Portrait” remain unknown even to me. I can share certain insights right now — this is the purpose of our dialogue –but I am bound to view things differently in several years: I will understand this moment, myself and my work from a different perspective. Ultimately, what I find absolutely necessary, and identify as my contribution, is the creation of a work of art that provides a space to reflect, to pose questions and to explore multiple interpretations.

This brings us back to the issue of first-hand testimony and narration. How does one even discuss trauma, how can it be introduced into artistic space? Which hand are we talking about, if the witnesses are no longer alive?

Mira’s story is a construct, precisely because it is based on real events. The fact that the recording of every memory and every testimony is transmitted not only through the chosen medium, but also through the person creating the records, means that the testimony is mediated, (dis)possessed, given away in order to be disavowed. This is why I was haunted by the question of responsibility, of approaching and handling the material that was given (away), in all stages of the work, engaging in long discussions with myself. The trust involved in the conversations with my interlocutors, my loved ones, was crucial. At the same time, the present was running its own course, with all of its pre-established dynamics and relations, and for that reason this was, and still is, a singular psychological experience.

At the same time, it was imperative for me to confront my own ghosts. It was necessary to re-evaluate my own memory of Yugoslavia, especially at 148

the time of savage historical revision. This “confrontation” was vital and time-consuming. As I was making my way through the history of Mira’s family, I was also reassessing my own experience; whether my experience of Yugoslavia was lived, or whether it was another construct. Another motive for delving deep into the period of the existence of Yugoslavia was the desire for factual accuracy. Nevertheless, I am the most indebted to the conversations with Mira’s family and her friends, especially Mira’s mother Minka, who preserved the memory of the lost Pereras, as a precious witness of their existence, and whose own experiences before, during and after the war make up a large portion of this work.

By adopting the intimate perspective of the narrator, whose roles change in the course of the work, from third-person narration at the beginning of the work to first-person narration at the end, I wanted to explore different roles assigned to women (the work follows not only Mira’s life, but also the life of her mother), the possibilities for personal choices and decisions, which are not conditioned by political events and our relationship with them. Is it possible to live outside the predefined identity framework and the burden of past suffering, is trauma transmitted to successive generations, was it possible to establish a state free from war trauma, from the wider geopolitical context? — these are some of the questions I wished to raise in this work.

Naturally, I am taking into account the contexts in which the work will be exhibited, because I find that communication with the audience is an important factor to consider in the process of creation. In Graz we discussed the social and political context of the exhibition. Such a context always exists because, historically speaking, no society is innocent of crime. On the other hand, I can hope that there will be a chance to present a work that deals with the silence surrounding the crimes committed during the last war and the breakup of Yugoslavia — in Belgrade. 149

On Mar 28, 2016, at 4:42 PM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Dear Jelena,

Speaking from a local perspective, one of the reasons “Mira” strikes me as relevant is the fact that it defies both historical revisionism, on the one hand, and the hipster nostalgia contained in the neoliberal consumerism of post-socialist symbols and instant “memory”, on the other. In other words, even though you refrain from auto-interpretation, you do not fall into the trap of depolitization.

In researching the media of photography and film, along with the phenomenological approach you mention, you develop a distinctive method of constructing your own cinematic and artistic language. The focus on detail emerges as one of its central features. For instance, the way you “descend” from the panoramic view into the grass, revealing the messy complexity of the unknown which remains in the details, reveals what the work is trying to accomplish: to render the invisible visible. On the other hand, the focus, the drawing in and zooming in, converge and result in interesting shifts between two forever conflicting positions, the observer and the observed. Moreover, the one who observes zooms in to such a close-up that she becomes the one who offers a view from the inside. It is from this very ambivalence, from the volatility and unreliability of image, that your poetics emerges and serves as the basis for your political position. In other words, we can, to borrow Guattari’s term, speak of ethico-aesthetics and wonder: “What perspectives on collective subjectivity are available in this ‘Study for a Portrait?’”

This question arises from the interplay of language and image, detail and whole, but also from the dramaturgical choices regarding pronoun use: in playing with the narrator’s position, in the transition from the (neutral) third person to the second (through direct address): “You knew he would be waiting for you when the school bell rang, your timetable in his hand”, and the first person (who is the first person?): 150

Towards the end, the ambivalence of the pronouns “you”, “I”, “we” becomes particularly prominent: 151

Its purpose is to create the impression of plurality and polyphony, to de- individualize individual stories without claiming universality — quite the contrary, by staying sensitive to the echoes of potential collectivity of experience, on the one hand, and to the echoes of history constructed out of the plurality of many “partial subjectivities”, on the other.

As I was watching the work again, after a long time, I realized that my own memory had made an interesting distortion. I could clearly remember the shifting position of the narrator mentioned earlier, but I had completely forgotten that the narrator’s voice was male. You say:

> I wanted to explore different roles assigned to women (the work follows not only Mira’s life, but also the life of her mother), the possibilities for personal choices and decisions, which are not conditioned by political events and our relationship with them.

You speak from a feminist position, and you contribute to “women’s” writing, so the decision to use a male narrator cannot be unintentional. How did you arrive at this choice?

On Mar 28, 2016, at 8:43 PM, Jelena Juresa wrote:

Dear Aneta,

Your observation is very astute, there is a clear reason for choosing a male narrator, and this brings us to the beginning of our correspondence: this kind of work is not a biography, but a construct. It would certainly be easy to use the framework of media to express my own affective reactions as I was uncovering the history of the family and Mira’s life. In that case, however, what would be missing is the additional “perspective” that uses the seemingly biographical narrative to explore and write multiple levels of meaning into the 152

work, leaving space for reflection. Namely, in the first video, the third person narrator introduces the audience to the history of Mira’s family and the events that precede her birth. He does this in a rather traditional way, unequivocally male, which is also the most intelligible, because this is how we learn to “read” the media, and we do not question the content of the utterance. On the other hand, the remove from which the narrator approaches the events, especially the part of the narrative which deals with the atrocities, is contrasted with images that introduce another level of interpretation and provoke unease.

At the beginning of the second video, the narrator addresses Mira, speaking in the second person, without giving in to empathy. It is precisely in this play, in the shifting of roles and the (un)clarities that stem from this relationship, that Mira’s (in)ability to adapt to her various roles is explored. Above all, the focus is on Mira as a child, the second generation, who had to deal with the aftermath of the war as one of the descendants of the survivors. As I write, I remember a book titled “Why They Said Nothing: Mother and Daughter on One and the Same War”, by Nevena Simin. Reflecting on her own life and the life of her parents, especially her mother’s, the author raises the question of the applicability of statutory limitations on war crimes, as well as the impact of the Holocaust on the generations after.

When the narrator starts speaking to Mira in the first person, more directly and more intimately, what becomes almost tangibly felt is the fact that he, despite adopting the role of Mira’s son, does not refrain from criticizing her, and that in narrating the sketches of personal memories he questions Mira’s decisions, portrayed as leading up to her tragic end. However, the seeming harshness of first-person testimony is juxtaposed with the pain caused by the absence of the narrator’s addressee. In this tension, the viewer (un)wittingly takes Mira’s side, and this allows them to question the connections between the multi-layered narratives which at times intersect in the work, be it the wider historical context, the gaze directed at the dynamics of family relations, or individual dilemmas. 153

On Apr 4, 2016, at 3:52 AM, Aneta Stojnic wrote:

Dear Jelena,

It could be said that the voice of the male narrator introduces a measure of alienation, of almost Brechtian estrangement, which establishes a direct relationship between the work and the audience. The relationship does not rely merely on empathy; on the contrary, it encourages the audience to reflect and understand. If the audience “take Mira’s side”, it is not because they identify with her, but because they understand the position she symbolically occupies and the complexity of the socio-political (and personal is political, as we have already “established”) relations that the said (hi)story represents.

To bring our correspondence to a conclusion, I think we ought to mention another element of your work which has been unjustly, although perhaps understandably,2 underrepresented in discussions and critical analyses: the book. Namely, “Mira, Study for a Portrait” works on three media levels: there is a two-channel video installation, a series of photographs and a book. Or perhaps these should be listed in reverse order, where the book comes first, as the format that predates the developments in the other two media (although this chronology would be a construct as well, just like any other). What is particularly noteworthy about the book is the manner in which you construct the relationship between photography and language, between the visual and the written text. You provide ample (or sufficient) empty space around the photographs. The space creates a certain kind of tense silence in the rhythmical structure of the book. A sort of punctuation, or accent… perhaps restraint from speech?

It is no coincidence that a literary medium was included in a work which revolves around the issue of historicization. Through these three formats

2 Because the video is the dominant element, both in visual and interpretative terms. 154

— book, video, photography — you seem to play with the notion of the ephemeral in memory, which has to be reinforced and reinterpreted by establishing intertextual ties between different sources of content, different voices. The source of this polyphony is Mira — not as an individual, but as a subject, the one that leads us into the space of collective memory. A subject that invokes and invites plurality, without factual relativization.

Writing about the narrator from the beginning of the first video, you say:

> He does this in a rather traditional way, unequivocally male, which is also the most intelligible, because this is how we learn to “read” the media, and we do not question the content of the utterance.

It seems to me that the book has a similar intention of “not questioning”. We are used to thinking of the book as a “finite”, “traditional” form, unlike the video, which we still tend to perceive as more ephemeral. By manipulating these “standards”, you give us a book which provides both a sketch and a summary of the entire work. On the other hand, your title allows for incompleteness… almost modestly… referring to this complex medley of different media, images, texts, archive materials, oral narratives, written documents, myths, facts and collective memories as — a “study for a portrait”.

You wrote earlier:

> Mira’s story is a construct, precisely because it is based on real events.

I wonder whose portrait is this study for? Is it for the period which comes under its direct assessment, or for the forthcoming period, the one which begins where Mira ends?

All the best, Aneta 155 156

References:

— Breht, Bertolt. Majka hrabrost, Rad, Beograd, 1964 [Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Eric Bentley, Grove Press, New York, 1991]. — Breht, Bertolt. Dijalektika u teatru, Nolit, Beograd, 1966. — De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984. — Derrida, Jacques. Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996. — Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press, 1995. — Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia. Routledge, 2012. — Schneider, Rebecca. Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment. Taylor & Francis, 2011. — Simin, Nevena. Magda Simin. Zašto su ćutale? — ili majka i ćerka o istom ratu. Futura publikacije, Novi Sad 2007 [Simin, Nevena, Magda Bosan-Simin. Why They Said Nothing: Mother and Daughter on One and the Same War, trans. Rajka Marinkovic, Novi Sad, Media Art Content Ltd, 2015]. — Zebald, Vinfrid Georg. Austerlic. Paideia, Beograd, 2009 [Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, New York, Random House, 2001]. 157 158 159 160

Christel Stalpaert

The Letter 161

1 162 163

2 164 165

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Sint-Lievens-Esse, Monday, 21 March 2016

Dear Jelena,

I hope you are fine. I know you are preparing things to travel from Ghent to Serbia. This letter might reach you somewhere in between, lingering between past and future images of a foreign homeland.

Some images have the power to stick in the brain.

They haunt our memory, flickering in a fluid of emotions. Mira, Study for a Portrait (2010–2014) will haunt my mind forever. And that’s a good thing. There is this powerful image of a railway, covered with moss and greenery. Like many other photographic images in Mira, it flirts with the “intractable reality” of the past. Of course, this image resonates with the sad history of the deportation of the Jews to the death camps by railway transports, under strict supervision of the German Nazis and their allies. The Judenrampe leading towards the entrance gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau is iconic in this matter. The image functions as an “emphatic marker” in our collective memory.1 Even more so, it has become representative of a whole historical event.

1 Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows. Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 7. 167

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I catch myself in the act of writing “of course” a couple of sentences ago. Thinking over the self-evidence of this association, I realize that, being circulated over and over again, an image runs the risk of inciting short circuit thinking; an analogous sign calls — pars pro toto — for cognitive recognition of a complete event. It becomes an “iconic cliché”.2

Is it possible that iconic clichés prevent us from thinking through the complexity of a cultural trauma? According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the overwhelming horror of violent images in the media and their univocal call for sympathy for the victims prevent us from thinking about the deeper mechanisms of violence.3 I tend to believe him.

It takes some time before I realize that such death rails also exist in Belgium. Research teaches me that the Kazern Dossin in Malines was a transit camp for Jews and Gypsies (SS Samellager Mecheln) where 25,259 people were deported to Auschwitz. It was called the antechamber of death. Only 1,123 survived the death camp. For more

2 Chris Vos, Bewegend verleden. Inleiding tot de analyse van films en televisieprogramma’s (Amsterdam: Boom, 2004), p. 176. 3 Slavoj Žižek, Violence. Six Sideways Glances (London: Profile Books, 2009). 169

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than fifty years, its railway was also covered in greenery, oblivious of the deportation activities that took place there. After the liberation, the building resumed its pre-war military function, as if nothing had happened. It was only in 1996 that the Kazern Dossin was turned into a museum, acknowledging its deportation activities.4

Memory scholar Douwe Draaisma is right: forgetting is one of memory’s crucial capacities.5 It serves as a kind of protective shield in coping with traumatic events. It allows traumatized people to move on with their lives. In fact, Draaisma calls the art of forgetting essential for preserving valuable relationships and encouraging personal contentment. But what if this “art” of forgetting turns into a politics of oblivion?

I think the revelatory function of art is not to be underestimated here.

On Narrative Recall

Some words have the power to stick in the brain.

Some words have the power to heal.

Narrative recall is considered an important tool in “working through” cultural traumas. To narrate enables a community “to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it”. 6 As James Thompson observed, “constructing a narrative from

4 Maxime Steinberg, Ward Adriaens, Laurence Schram (eds.), La destruction des juifs et des tsiganes de Belgique (Bruxelles: VUBPress, 2009). 5 Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting. Myths, Perils and Compensations, trans. by Liz Waters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 6 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 10. 171

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the pain of the past allows it to be contained or healed”.7 Novelist Aleksandar Hemon also exclaimed that in order to understand our histories, we have to narrate our catastrophes. As such, Mira, Study for a Portrait unfolds how the shared Ladino language of the displaced Sephardic Jews “comforted them like an embrace”.

But what kind of narrative is at work when “working through” cultural traumas? Is it possible that some master narratives prevent us from thinking about the deeper mechanisms of violence?

News items love to present facts and figures in reporting “objectively” about catastrophic events. A trauma is hence rendered intelligible, pegged to a data set or to solid statistics. As if the mathematical precision of death rates would make the trauma more easily digestible.

In four years of war in Yugoslavia, over a million soldiers and civilians of every nationality, belief and political standing were killed.

In Mira, Study for a Portrait, these exact figures and explanatory notes are rare. More abundant are the poetic phrases, accompanied by images of a natural any-space-whatever, or by sparkling moments of silence.

Over seven thousand streaming corpses around the mountain range, masses of wounded swimming between them.

I do not get a complete picture of Mira, not even a portrait. I have to engage with a study for a portrait. The video is developed from (archival) research, but the documents used are not strategically mise-en-chaîne in order to convince the spectator of a truth behind a

7 James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the End of Effect (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 45. 173

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historical event, of a truth that needs to be recovered from the folds of history. This video does not report. It does not present facts. It does not draw solid connections and does not attempt to convince the audience of an objective representation of a katastrofa. It does not claim to reveal the Truth, it is more interested in truth functions than the Truth itself; it is mostly investigating “the conditions of its creation”.8

That is why I am denied a clear and sharp image of Mira, Jozef or Rifka. I do get to see an over-exposed photo or a photo with too much backlight, offering me an image of a bride whose face is covered with shade. Or I get to see shoes, shoelaces, dirt and mud on shoes. I get to see a kaleidoscope of sideways glances into the life of Mira, and of the katastrofas that befell her family, as the “katastrofa is everywhere, its particles always shimmering like shrapnel on a sunny day”.9

It is also a poetic conception of space that I have to deal with. With Mira, I move through an intensive space, lacking spatial orientation. Rather than providing spatial coordinates, the images of nature offer an ungrounded space. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception. (…) It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio.” 10 The scene reminds us of — nothing. It breathes the emptiness of a Deleuzian espace quelconque or any-space-whatever.

8 The “truth” is called truth function in Deleuze’s thinking, “a concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation”. Paul Patton, “Introduction.”, Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 5. 9 Aleksandar Hemon, “To Understand Our Histories We Have to Narrate Our Catastrophies”, Lapham’s Quarterly (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ disaster/katastrofa). 10 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 528. 175

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These sideways glances on violence and trauma do not offer me a unilateral or straightforward perspective along which I can identify with the characters and through which I can experience catharsis. On the contrary, the sideways glances inaugurate what Deleuze would call a shock to thought; I am not merely affectively overwhelmed, my affects connect with a Denkbild or image pensante: “l’image devient pensée, capable de saisir les mécanismes de la pensée”.11 The startling effect or “shock” invites me to a new mode of thinking; that is to move beyond the mathematical, easily digestible format of facts and figures. Following Žižek, genuine thinking comes to an end when we too easily look away from the overwhelming horror of violent images in the media, when we look away from the horror we recognize in the violence that is represented. Creative thinking, however, emerges when the cognitive gaze stutters and stumbles, when there is no longer any univocal recognition. When we are offered no catharsis or easily digestible facts and figures.

Herds driven down to the river Rolled in thick blankets

But, it is mostly in the silence that follows, that my thoughts are woven.

On Sticky Silence

Some sounds have the power to stick in the brain.

Think of the frustration a stubborn earworm can cause. There is something imperative in the functioning of these earworms. That’s why neurologist Oliver Sacks refers to them as fixations in the brain.12

11 Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), p. 75. 12 Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia. Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf Canada, 2007), p. 44. 177

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The ‘catchy’ or ‘sticky’ music “hooks the listener”13 and leaves ample space for creative imagination.

The auditory space in Mira, Study for a Portrait, overwhelmed me in a different way. Because of the sustained silence, I felt unhooked from any kind of “easy” listening and comforting tunes. And strangely enough, this being unhooked felt terrifying and liberating at the same time. The silence withdrew more emotions and meanings from me than catchy tunes ever allowed me to imagine, moving my musical imagination beyond sentimental and nostalgic tunes. These extremely varied unconscious associations were manifold, sometimes absurd, sometimes explicit, most of the time tangible like billowing smoke.

Some moments of silence inaugurate paucity in my thoughts. It allows me to stutter in my interpretation. Silence is then not the negation of language, nor a posture of negativity. It is the creative urge to express oneself despite the short-circuiting effect of rigid language systems and clear images; it is the pronouncement of the unspeakable not despite, but thanks to the blank spaces of silence. Silence or “not-telling” is from this perspective not “a dangerous retreat, a failure or the site of continued harm”,14 nor a “tailing off into silence”,15 but a confident embrace of articulatory potentiality.

13 Ibid., p. 42. 14 James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the End of Effect (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 45. 15 Derek Summerfield, “‘My Whole Body is Sick… My Life is Not Good’: a Rwandan Asylum Seeker Attends a Psychiatric Clinic in London”, Forced Migration and Mental Health: Rethinking the Care of Refugees and Displaced Persons, ed. David Ingleby (London: Springer, 2006), p. 98. 179

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In Ode on a Grecian Urn, the poet John Keats evocates why he prefers that “unravish’d bride of quietness”, that “foster-child of Silence and slow Time” above heard melodies.

Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ (…)

On Palpable Absence

First memory. Chin resting on the back of the chair.

Images of empty seats, some of them with blankets hanging over the backrest, cling to my brain. They are bound up with a high level of familiarity and, at the same time, with an acute sense of inaccessibility. Its atmosphere is dense with palpable absence. The elliptical quality of the images lies in their ambivalent interplay between presence and absence. On the one hand, these images breathe loneliness and isolation. Death might be present in the absence of a living body. The Christmas tree and some party garlands seem out of place in this setting. The blankets function like the chalk drawings used by the police to mark the position of an absent corpse.

On the other hand, the blanket on the seat also reminds me of a body that used to be comforted with its warmth. Someone put a blanket on a seat. At least someone took into consideration this need to be comforted. Someone cared for a person who needed help. 181 182

Old people deserve attention. (…) You have dinner with them, entertain them, help to take their minds off of their absent children. You ask yourself whether someone will take care of you in your older days.

Some day in the future, I will recall these words.

Mira, Study for a Portrait (2010–2014) will haunt my mind forever. And that’s a good thing. It demands to move hesitantly along sideways glances. It demands to move away from the one-sided perspective on violence exercised by one individual or a clearly identifiable group. Only after a while, with the trained eye of a sideways glance, can I start seeing the contours of the background that generates eruptions of violence.

A big hug, and stay safe,

Christel 183

19 184 185

Image list:

1. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, video still 2. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, video still 3. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, video still 4. Claude Lanzman, Shoah, 1985, film still 5. Lars Von Trier, Europa, 1991, film still 6. Claude Lanzman, Shoah, 1985, film still 7. A photograph taken in Jasenovac (Croatia), former concentration camp, in July 2012 (Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014) 8. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, photograph 9. Ana Torfs, Displacement, installation view, WIELS, Brussels, 2014 © photo: Ana Torfs 10. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, photograph 11. Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, 1955, video still 12. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, photograph 13. Ophelia, painting by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt (1851–1852) © Tate (2016) CC–BY–NC–ND 3.0 (Unported) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506 14. Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972, film still 15. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, video still 16. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, photograph 17. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, photograph 18. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, video still 19. Jelena Jureša, Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, video still 186

Literature:

— Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. — Deleuze, Gilles. Pourparlers 1972–1990. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990. — Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Transl. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. — Draaisma, Douwe. Forgetting. Myths, Perils and Compensations. Transl. Liz Waters. New Have: Yale University Press, 2015. — Hemon, Aleksandar. “To Understand Our Histories We Have to Narrate Our Catastrophies.” Lapham’s Quarterly. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/disaster/katastrofa — Liss, Andrea. Trespassing through Shadows. Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. — Patton, Paul. “Introduction.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 1–17. — Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia. Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf Canada, 2007. — Schram, Laurence. Transport XX. Mechelen–Auschwitz. Brussel: VUBPress, 2008. — Steinberg, Maxime, Ward Adriaens and Laurence Schram (eds.) La destruction des juifs et des tsiganes de Belgique. Bruxelles: VUBPress, 2009. — Summerfield, Derek. “‘My Whole Body Is Sick… My Life Is Not Good’: a Rwandan Asylum Seeker Attends a Psychiatric Clinic in London.” Forced Migration and Mental Health: Rethinking the Care of Refugees and Displaced Persons. Ed. David Ingleby. London: Springer, 2006, p. 97–114. — Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the End of Effect. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 187

— Vos, Chris. Bewegend verleden. Inleiding tot de analyse van films en televisieprogramma’s, Amsterdam: Boom, 2004. — Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. Six Sideways Glances. London: Profile Books, 2009. 188 189 190

Sarah Mendelsohn

Ocean, Marvel, Strange, Rebellious 191

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is nameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds... I argued...for plethora, for kaleidoscopic shifting, for excess. I insisted that words did more than nominate.1 —Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

I recently received a text message announcing that two friends had given birth to a baby. They sent a photo: a tan and pink bundle wrapped in fleece. I quickly wrote back and asked for the baby’s name. The pho- to wasn’t enough. It didn’t matter that these friends live in another country and their newborn may be a toddler before I meet him. I needed a caption to accompany the photo, to turn over in my head, to be prepared to pronounce whenever we next speak on Skype.

Jelena Jureša’s MIRA, Study for a Portrait (2010–2014) traces the weight a name carries against the pull of history. Through multiple forms—a two-channel video installation, a series of photographs, lithographs, and a book—Jureša conveys the biography of her protagonist in starts and stops. Mira’s name, both its meanings and its sound, provides punctuation. Naming provides one method for measuring absence, as in my relationship to my friends’ baby who I haven’t yet met.

Jonatan, my friends wrote back the next day. We just decided.

Jonatan: my anchor in a possible future intimacy.

In Jureša’s video installation, we come to know Mira through cropped and shadowy images, the rooms and landscapes in which she may

1 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), p. 4. 192

have resided, and the narrator’s steady English-language voice-over.2 The first channel of Jureša’s video tells the story of Mira’s parents, their relationship before her birth: their Jewish and Muslim backgrounds and lives in Bosnia before the Second World War; their meeting as Partisans. The second part of the video resumes at Mira’s birth: her childhood in Belgrade and move to Sarajevo, multiple marriag- es, the birth of her children; everything leading up to her death in 1990, “near Pakrac, where riots soon broke out heralding the beginning of war in Croatia and the fragmentation of the former Yugosla- via.” Details of personal biography intersect with sweeping moments in twentieth-century Southeast European history: the formation and dissolution of Yugoslavia, the destruction of thousands of lives in concentration camps. At every intersection, personal narrative and cultural history question each other: not, which is stronger or more important? but, how does one help us know the other more—or less—clearly?

In both intimacy and historical narrative, names can remind us of the awful tension between second- and third-person points of view. Jureša’s MIRA video embodies this tension. Most of the video is narrated in the third person, with Mira addressed as the second person “you.” In the second section of the video, the narrator reveals himself to be Mira’s son (unnamed). He claims for himself a gender identity, a generational identity, an emotional stake; an “I” with a clear relation to the “you.” The voice belongs to Tim Kerslake, an English language teacher who has lived in multiple countries, and whose speech reflects that: cool English inflections, seemingly familiar pronunciation of Serbian place-names. His elusive accent seems at once suspended from the events he describes and very close to them. At once suspended and very close, Mira hovers between “you” and “she” (Mira).

2 In a Skype conversation, Jureša identifies the power of English to perform as Esperanto. 193

Paired with written titles that periodically name a scene in blocky white type (“Bijeljina,” “Semlin Judenlager,” or “1990”), the style of voice-over narration recalls tropes of social documentary or historical fiction. To a European or American audience, these are culturally familiar forms for collectively remembering the events of the Holo- caust. Within this space of commentary, the narrator’s speech conveys a sense of inherited history, and an accompanying knowingness. He explains matter-of-factly, “Death was constant and daily.” “You and your brother would rise together. Missing attention. Withheld.”

Mira’s narrative is tied up in the narratives of her country and century. At the same time, her narrative resists being swallowed by history, dwelling instead on specific, intimate details. Memory works in concert with images, and against them. In MIRA, images sometimes act as triggers to memory. (“Photographs can make strong breaks in the mind. My memories rely on photographs.”) A series of photographic images from personal and family archives bridge the different forms of Jureša’s project. These are treated as unstable documents, held al- ternately at an arm’s length and under a magnifying glass.

Aware that the only picture you see is of your ancestors, here in their old homeland, entering your picture through the frame. The Pereras. You think of your father and his premature death. All of those stories of the family history stacked up and let loose like a busted reservoir wall. Here in this short moment. A flood.

In concert with and against the photographic images of the video, Mi- ra’s son’s narration not only dwells on but relies on intimate details. Without showing us what they looked like, he recalls his mother’s tiny feet, her dark smile, her love of theater. He recalls being unable to remember her ever having shouted. (“Do you even know how to?”) 194

Jureša’s work asks, what happens when this specific story about specific people intersects with the Holocaust, or with place-names like Jasenovac or Laborgrad? What happens to narrative, to language?

The audience who reacts to hearing the word Holocaust might not re- act in the same way to hearing Jasenovac, or Laborgrad. Jureša’s narrator helps fill in those gaps in associational memory, succinctly re- counting the events that took place at these concentration camps. He recounts the events in his speech, using direct language, rather than direct images. He is not a witness, but a recipient of names.

At the same time, MIRA respects these differences in perspective, in memory. The work questions how much meaning we can attach to a name, or to a view into the woods, the place-name Jasenovac typed out, framing the image. Which is more evocative: the woods or the word? Which is more evocative, and for whom: Sajmište concentration camp or Semlin Judenlager?

Throughout MIRA, images also act as memorials, sometimes in in- direct ways. A still shot in the sunlit woods marks the place where Serbian, Roma, and Jewish exiles once hid in fear. A flamenco dancer performs alone within filmic darkness, holding eye contact with the camera as she begins to move slowly to soulful Yugoslav music.3 Throughout the video, the dancer acts as a second recipient of Mi- ra’s story. After the narrator recounts some of the most violent ep- isodes, the video cuts to her, standing up straight, eyes alert, head slightly cocked as if listening. Her image counters the archival quality of the Perera family photographs, and the filmic images of nature.

3 The performer dances to a song performed by Jadranka Stojaković, who is known for her gentle voice. Jureša: “Some quarrel over the history of the song. While it clearly resembles Bosnian Sevdalinka songs, Jadranka’s interpretation brings new feeling, evoking an era, and, for some, Yugoslavia. It is a song about absence and longing.” 195

We cannot quite identify her as the narrator, Mira’s son, but her connection to Stojaković’s song and her attentiveness—the fact that she is the only live performer to appear on camera—suggests that they might somehow be allies. There is a tension between what can be shown, what can be suggested, and what can be described with language. The dancer too goes unnamed.

Memorialization occurs through absence, by looking at something else—not exactly remnants, but expressions of what is left behind. Just as a name can signify absence, the absence of a name can imply being so close as to slip beyond conscious narrative.

MIRA led Jureša to travel through the landscapes the work depicts. Her process of travel and research parallels the process the work takes up in its viewers, the movement between the named and un-nameable. MIRA internalizes the skepticism around naming the events of the Holocaust, and skepticism of over-cautiousness, as outlined by Giorgio Agamben, who writes that, “to say that Auschwitz is “unsay- able” or “incomprehensible” is equivalent to euphemein, to adoring in silence, as one does with a god.”4 Agamben does not linger here on the question of audience: in his writing, Auschwitz carries overwhelming, crushing associations. But the power of such a name also depends on who says it, how it is spoken, and to whom. Jureša both names events and provides ways around naming, identifying the power of a name to vary in meaning—even that of Mira, whose portrait is cut with alternate etymologies:

4 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 32–33. 196

In her book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson recalls an argument with her partner about the intimate power of names: does naming lim- it meaning by fixing individual perceptions in relation to knowledge; or is naming “kaleidoscopic”, in the way that words stretch the more they’re used, meanings doubling, splintering, rearranging themselves in time...? Nelson traces her thinking to Roland Barthes, who wrote:

Gossip reduces the other to he/ she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.5

5 Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard, A Lover’s Discourse (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), p. 185. 197

Intimacy, Barthes argues, holds us so close that we find each other’s pronouns “intolerable”. Closeness is defined by the intolerability of absence, that we may become memories: “non-people.”

Thoughtfully and with a lot of care, Jureša brings together the intimate and historical parameters of living with names. If names act as containers for what is left behind, they are also flexible containers, deeply held, withheld. The multiple meanings of Mira’s own name emphasize an openness of both perception and interpretation. A gold- en field, wind blowing through it. A lush waterfall. A family photograph. A soap opera. Mira (one etymology or another) and photographs of the ocean. Columbus’s ocean: a vast signifier, pre-colonization, pregnant with possibility. Mira’s ocean: strange, rebellious. 198 199 200 201 202

Biografije/Biographies 203

Jelena Jureša javnom prostoru – kapitalizma–tu- Prevashodno se bavi pitanjima rizma–kopirajta – kao i vidljivost i identiteta, politikama sećanja i za- kreiranje muških i ženskih istorija boravljanja, kroz medij fotografije, u ovom kontekstu. Tokom reziden- video-instalacije i teksta. Fokus cije u Q21 u Beču, 2016. godine, bavi njenog rada počiva na odnosu pose proučavanjem rada antropologa smatrača i posmatranog, i reprezen- i rasnih higijeničara imperijalne tacijskih (ne)moći „slike”. Učestvo- Austrije, kao i politikama zaborava vala je na samostalnim i grupnim nakon Drugog svetskog rata. Tre- izložbama u zemlji i inostranstvu. nutno živi u Gentu (Belgija), gde radi Tokom umetničkih rezidencijalnih doktorat na Fakultetu za umetnost boravaka u Parizu, 2004. i 2005, rea- i filozofiju Univerziteta u Gentu i na lizovala je radove iz serije „Tourists” Konzervatorijumu KASK, sa fokusom (2004–2006). Kao umetnica koja na politike sećanja i zaboravljanja se kroz svoj rad kritički osvrće na u Evropi dvadesetog veka. U ovom istoriju, te proučava arhivsku građu, radu Jureša daje poseban osvrt na Jureša istražuje pojam istine na rubu negaciju ratnih zločina nakon ras- reprezentacije, i sučeljava privatna pada Jugoslavije u Republici Srpskoj sećanja sa političkim i istorijskim i Srbiji, konstruisanje nacionalnog narativima. U poslednjim radovi- identiteta Austrije nakon Anšlusa, u ma, u kojima se bavila pitanjem odnosu na ćutanje o Holokaustu, te rodnog identiteta, odnosno kultur- izgradnju belgijskog identiteta na- nog identiteta, narativ je u prvom kon kolonijalne prošlosti. planu i objedinjen je sa slikom u vidu teksta, audio-zapisa ili muzike (STILL, 2013; Mira: Study for a Por- trait, 2010–2014; Notes on PMS, 2012; Mozarts, 2009; What it feels like for a girl, 2005–2009). Tokom umetničkog rezidencijalnog boravka, u saradnji sa Hyde Park Art Center u Čikagu, razvija novi umetnički projekat, kojim propituje odnose umetnosti u 204

Jelena Jureša has been exten- a new art project, tackling the ques- sively working with the questions tions and relations of public art of identity, politics of memory and — capitalism–tourism–copyright, oblivion through the media of pho- as well as production of male and tography, video and text. The focus female histories within this context. of her work is the relationship be- During her artist in residence at Q21 tween the observer and the observed in Vienna in 2016, she studies the within the confines of the „image”, work of anthropologists and racial and what it does and does not con- hygienists of Austrian imperial pe- vey. She has participated in solo and riod, as well as politics of oblivion group exhibitions internationally. after WWII. As a PhD researcher at During her artistic residential stays Ghent University, Faculty of Arts in Paris in 2004 and 2005, she cre- and Philosophy, research centre ated the works from the „Tourists” S:PAM and KASK Conservatorium she (2004–2006) series. Being an artist is focusing on politics of oblivion who works with history and with in relation to three traumatic pasts archives, Juresa investigates the no- of the twentieth century, in the tion of truth on the verge of repre- context of Europe: the negation of sentation, hence combining private war crimes after the dissolution of memories with artifacts and politi- Yugoslavia in the Republic of Srpska cal and historical narratives. In her and Serbia, the construction of a latest work in which she addresses national identity in Austria after the the issue of gender, that is, cultural Anschluss and its relation to the si- identity, the narrative is in the fore- lence on the Holocaust, and the con- ground and is united with the image struction of a Belgian identity in the in the form of a textual or auditory aftermath of its colonial past. narration or music (STILL, 2013; Mira: Study for a Portrait, 2010–2014, Notes on PMS, 2012; Mozarts, 2009; What it feels like for a girl, 2005–2009). During her art residency and in collaboration with the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, she is developing 205

Izabrane samostalne izložbe / 2009 What It Feels Like for a Girl, Selected solo exhibitions Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad 2015 Mira, Study for a Portrait, 2006 Tourists, Centre Culturel Künstlerhaus — Halle für Française, Belgrade Kunst und Medien, Graz 2014 Mira, Study for a Portrait, Mu- seum im Rathaus, Gleisdorf Izabrane grupne izložbe / — Mira, Study for a Portrait, Selected group exhibitions Galerija 90–60–90, Zagreb — STILL, Gallery of Contempo- 2016 Normalities, Austrian Cultural rary Art, Zrenjanin Forum New York, New York — Mira, Study for a Portrait, — From the collection: Latest ac- MMC Luka, Pula quisitions (2012–2015), Muse- 2013 Notes on PMS, Gallery VN, um of Contemporary Art Vo- Zagreb jvodina, Novi Sad — Mira, Study for a Portrait, In- 2015 Memory of Violence — Dreams ternational Festival: “Saraje- of the Future 1914–18 / 2014 #3, vo Winter 2013: Art of Touch”, National Museum of Monte- Sarajevo negro, Cetinje 2010 Critics have chosen (the — Conflicts, Provocations, Rela- choice of art historian Milan- tions, Challenges, Anxieties, ka Todić) Jelena Jureša: What Energies, Decisions Contem- It Feels Like for a Girl, Belgrade porary Art in the Expand- Cultural Centre, Belgrade ed Field / Art Scene in Vojvo- — What It Feels Like for a Girl, dina 1995–2014, Museum of Kultur.at: Frauenmonat, Graz Contemporary Art Vojvodina, — Mozarts, Zvono Gallery, Novi Sad Belgrade — Memory of Violence — Dreams — What It Feels Like for a Girl, of the Future 1914–18 / 2014 #2, Cultural Centre, Vršac production Goethe-Institut Belgrad, L’Institut français de Serbie and Museum of 206

Contemporary Art Vojvodi- 2012 Tension Field, Museum of na, Multimeda center KIBLA, Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Maribor Novi Sad — Subdued Existence — Cargo 2011 Art Athina: Activation of Pe- East — Contemporary Serbian ripheral vision, Athens Art, Museum of Contemporary 2010 namaTRE.ba 4 project, Acade- Art RS, Banja Luka my of Fine Arts, Trebinje — ARTSLAB: Memorial and Re- — 39. Novi Sad Salon (selection vision, Open Systems, WUK, of seven artist), Matica Srpska Vienna Gallery, Novi Sad 2014 Memory of Violence — Dreams 2009 Real Life Presence: Serbische of the Future 1914–18 / 2014 #1, Gegenwartskunst, Kunstler- production Goethe-Institut haus, Graz Belgrade, L’Institut français — Tourists City — Polis Festival, de Serbie and Museum of Old printing house, Pula Contemporary Art Vojvodina, 2006 Beginning of the Century, Des- Novi Sad tinies and Comments, City Gal- — Only in her eyes, Magacin u lery, Labin Kraljevica Marka, Belgrade 2004 Regard de l’autre, La Galerie — Subdued Existence — Cargo East Itinerrance, Paris — Contemporary Serbian Art, — Women in Art and the Spaces of Gallery 202, National Taiwan Femininity, Belgrade Cultural Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung Centre, Belgrade 207

Una Popović je kustoskinja Mu- Una Popović is a curator at the zeja savremene umetnosti u Beo- Museum of Contemporary Art in gradu. Njen rad je neposredno vezan Belgrade. Her work is directly linked za istraživanje u oblasti savremene with explorations in the field of con- umetnosti, od istorijskog konceptu- temporary art, from historical con- alizma do današnjih praksi. Ostva- ceptualism to contemporary practi- rila je značajne saradnje sa regio- ces. Popović has accomplished major nalnom i međunarodnom scenom i collaborative projects on the regio- organizovala internacionalne pro- nal and international scene, as well jekte. Godine 2013. pozvana je u mu- as organizing international projects. zej Tate Modern u Londonu, gde je In 2013, she was invited as a guest kao gostujući ko-kustos radila na curator to Tate Modern in London, izložbi Izvrnuta kuća. Od skorašnjih where she co-curated the exhibiti- međunarodnih kustoskih projeka- on Inverted House. Her recent proje- ta izdvajaju se Besformno: Promenjiva cts in curating include Formless: Flu- stvarnost u umetnosti novih medija, id Reality in New Media Art, Istanbul Bilgy Univerzitet, Istanbul i Načini Bilgy University; Ways to Overcome, prevazilaženja, grupna međunarod- an international group exhibition na izložba u saradnji sa Künstlerhaus in collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bremen, Nemačka. Bremen, Germany. 208

Branka Benčić Branka Benčić Branka Benčić (Zagreb, HR) je neza- Branka Benčić (Zagreb, CRO) is an in- visna kustoskinja iz Zagreba. dependent curator with basic resear- U kustoskom i istraživačkom radu ch, writing and curatorial interests usmerena je na savremenu umet- in contemporary art, exhibiting film nost, eksperimentalni film i video, and video, experimental cinema, kao i kustoske prakse. Kustoskinja je research based projects, exhibition projekta Cinemaniac koji se od 2002. histories and curatorial practices. realizuje kao prateći program Festi- She has curated group exhibitions, vala igranog filma u Puli, projekta artiststs solo projects and film scree- Kino umjetnika u Muzeju suvreme- nings in Croatia and internationally, ne umjetnosti u Zagrebu (od 2012) held lectures and published on con- i umetnička je direktorka Apote- temporary art in exhibition catalo- ke – Prostora za suvremenu umjet- gues, journals and magazines. Ar- nost. Kao kustoskinja realizovala tistic director of Apoteka — Space je više od 30 grupnih i 50 samostal- for contemporary art; Founder and nih izložbi, te screening programe u Curator of Cinemaniac — Think Hrvatskoj i inostranstvu. Objavjuje Film. Selected group exhibitions: eseje i tekstove iz savremene umet- Notes on Undoing (Garis & Hahn, nosti i vizuelne kulture u izložbe- New York), Paper Movies (Pula, 2014), nim katalozima, stručnim publikaci- Damir Ocko: Studies on Shivering (KM, jama i časopisima. Graz, 2014); Think Film (MMC Pula, 2013), Video television Anticipation (MoCA Belgrade, 2013) etc. 209

Aneta Stojnic Aneta Stojnić Dr Aneta Stojnic (Beograd, SRB) je te- Aneta Stojnic, PhD (Belgrade, SRB) is oreticarka, umetnica i kustoskinja a Belgrade-born theoretician, artist iz Beograda. Doktorirala je na Uni- and curator. She received her PhD in verzitetu umetnosti u Beogradu 2013 Theory of Arts and Media at the Uni- godine. Od 2015. ima zvanje docen- versity of Arts in Belgrade in 2013. ta na Fakultetu za medije i komuni- Since 2015 she holds the position of kacije kao i mesto postdoktorskog assistant professor at the Faculty of istraživaca na Akademji Umetnosti u Media and Communications in Bel- Becu (Akademie der bildenden Kün- grade (FMK, Singidunum Universi- ste Wien) na programu za Postkon- ty) and a postdoctoral researcher at ceptualnu umetnost (PCAP). Tokom the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. 2013/14. bila je postdoktorski istra- In 2013–14 she was a postdoctoral živac na Univerzitetu u Gentu, na research fellow at Ghent Universi- Istraživackom centru za Izvođacke ty, Research centre S:PAM (Studies in umetnosti i medije (S:PAM). Dobit- Performing Arts & Media). She was nica je stipendije za gostujuceg dok- a visiting scholar at the Academy toranta na Akademiji umetnosti u of Fine Arts in Vienna in the Con- Becu 2013 godine, i umetnickih re- ceptual Art study program (2013) and zidencija u TanzQuartier-u u Becu, an artist in residence at Tanzquar- 2011. godine i Kultur Kontaktu u tier Vienna in 2011. In 2012 she was Becu 2012. godine. Autorka je knjige writer in residence at KulturKon- Teorija izvođenja u digitalnoj umetno- takt Austria. She published the book sti: Ka novom politickom performan- Theory of Performance in Digital Art: su (FMK i Orion Art, Beograd, 2015.) Towards a New Political Performance kao i brojnih internacionalnih pu- (Orion Art, Belgrade, 2015) and aut- blikacija, umetnickih i kustoskih hored a number of essays on contem- projekata. porary art and media, as well as various artistic and curatorial projects. 210

Kristel Stalpert Christel Stalpaert Kristel Stalpert (Gent, BE) je redovna Christel Stalpaert (Ghent, BE) is a profesorka na Univerzitetu u Gen- full professor at Ghent University tu u Belgiji, gde takođe radi i kao di- where she is director of the resear- rektorka istraživačkih centara S:PAM ch centres S:PAM (Studies in Perfor- (Studije performansa i medija) i PE- ming Arts and Media) and PEPPER PPER (Filozofija, etnologija, politika (Philosophy, Ethology, Politics and i performans). Glavne oblasti kojima Performance). Her main areas of re- se bavi u istraživanju su telesnost search are corporeality and interme- i intermedijalnost u performansu, diality in performance, dance and plesu i novim medijskim umetnič- new media arts (from the histori- kim praksama (od istorijske avangar- cal avant-garde to the present day) de do danas) u susretu sa filozofijom at the meeting-point of philosophy i etikom. Objavljivala je u stručnim and ethics. She published widely on časopisima kao što su Performance the topic in journals such as Perfor- Research, Text & Performance Quar- mance Research, Text & Performance terly, Contemporary Theatre Review Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Re- and Dance Research Journal, a uredila view and Dance Research Journal and je sledeća izdanja: No Beauty for Me edited other works such as No Beau- There Where Human Life Is Rare: on ty for Me There Where Human Life is Jan Lauwers’ Theatre Work with Need- Rare: on Jan Lauwers’ Theatre Work company (2007), Bastard or Playma- with Needcompany (2007), Bastard or te? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Me- Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating dia and the Contemporary Performing Media and the Contemporary Perfor- Arts (2012) i Unfolding Spectatorship. ming Arts (2012) and Unfolding Specta- Shifting Political, Ethical and Interme- torship. Shifting Political, Ethical and dial Positions (2016). Intermedial Positions (2016). 211

Sara Mendelson Sarah Mendelsohn Sara Mendelson (Čikago, SAD) je mul- Sarah Mendelsohn (Chicago, USA) timedijalna umetnica koja se bavi is a multimedia artist working performansom i dokumentarnim with performance and documen- formama. Bila je stipendista Ful- tary forms. She was a 2014–2015 brajtove fondacije u Beču tokom Fulbright Fellow in Vienna, where 2014/2015. gde je napisala Kneeling she wrote Kneeling and Streetwas- and Streetwashing, radio dramu koja hing, a radio play addressing a conte- se bavi problematičnim memorijal- sted war memorial. Upcoming pre- nim spomenikom žrtvama rata. Radi sentations of collaborative projects kao koproducent nezavisnog po- included at The Darling Foundry, dkasta Reconnaissance, koji istražu- Montreal, Dixon Place, New York, je veze između događaja u političkoj and KM Künstlerhaus, Halle für stvarnost i fikcije. Kunst & Medien, Graz. She co-produces Reconnaissance, an independent podcast exploring intersections between political realities and fictions. 212 213 214

MIRA, skica za portret 2010–2014. video instalacija (dva filma, u trajanju od po 45’ 35”) fotografije knjiga

Kamera, fotografija, montaža: Jelena Jureša Narator: Tim Kerslejk Zvuk: Studio Alpha, Vladimir Perović Filmska scena 16 mm / plesačica: Maria Keck Filmska scena 16 mm / Kamera: Nikola Sekerić Filmska scena 16 mm / Svetlo: Žarko Lazić Muzika: „Što te nema”, Jadranka Stojaković sa Miroslavom Tadićem, ljubaznošću Jadranke Stojaković Video scene iz filma: La violetera (Prodavačica ljubičica), 1958, Luis Cesar Amadori Bazirano na sećanju: Minke Redžić Perera • Josipa Perere • Gorana Jureše • Vesne Matić

Arhivske fotografije: ljubaznošću Minke Redžić Perera i Gorana Jureše

Produkcija: FORIN – Fond za razvoj istraživačkog novinarstva i nove medije • Elektrana – Centar za razvoj elektronske umetnosti i kulture 215

MIRA, Study for a Portrait 2010–2014 sound / video installation (two films, 45’ 35” each) photographs book

Direction, photography, editing: Jelena Jureša Narration: Tim Kerslake Sound: Studio Alpha • Vladimir Perović 16 mm film scene / Performer: Maria Keck 16 mm film scene / Camera: Nikola Sekeric 16 mm film scene / Light: Zarko Lazic Music: “Što te nema”, Jadranka Stojaković with Miroslav Tadić, courtesy of Jadranka Stojaković Video excerpts: from the movie La violetera, 1958, Luis César Amadori Based on the memories of: Minka Redžić Perera • Josip Perera • Goran Jureša • Vesna Matić

Archive photographs: courtesy of Minka Redžić Perera • Goran Jureša

Production: FORIN – Fund for the Development of Investigave Journalism and New Media • Elektrana – Centre for the Development of Electronic Arts and Culture 216

Jelena Jureša – MIRA, skica za portret Salon Muzeja savremene umetnosti • Beograd 15. april – 12. jun 2016.

Kustoskinja izložbe: Una Popović Organizacija i PR: Senka Ristivojević Postavka izložbe: tehnička služba MSU (Vlada Vidaković • Dejan Klajić • Nikola Cvetković • Dragan Stošić • Zoran Jakovljević • Saša Sarić)

Izdavač: Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd Za izdavača: Slobodan Nakarada, vršilac dužnosti direktora Urednica kataloga: Una Popović Saradnica na publikaciji: Branka Benčić Autorke tekstova: Una Popović • Branka Benčić • Aneta Stojnić • Jelena Jureša • Kristel Stalpaert • Sara Mendelson Prevod na engleski: Viktorija Krombholc • Vesna Brezovac Prevod na srpski: Viktorija Krombholc Prevod na hrvatski: Vesna Brezovac Lektura tekstova na srpskom: Maja Vojvodić Lektura tekstova na engleskom: Viktorija Krombholc • Randall A. Major • Dawn Michelle D’Atri

Fotografije otvaranja i postavke: Saša Reljić • Marija Konjikušić [Salon MSU, Beograd] • Jasenko Rasol [Galerija 90–60–90, Pogon, Zagreb] • Markus Krottendorfer [KM Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz]

Grafičko oblikovanje: Andrej Dolinka Štampa: Publikum, Beograd • 10/2016 Tiraž: 600 isbn 978–86–7101–330–7

Umetnica i Muzej savremene umetnosti se zahvaljuju Milanki Todić i Nikoli Šuici

Partner i podrška u izradi publikacije: Prijatelj izložbe i publikacije: GRADSKE GALERIJE OSIJEK Fakultetska 7 · 31000 Osijek · hrvatska 217

Jelena Jureša — MIRA, Study for a Portrait Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art • Belgrade April 15 – June 12, 2016

Exhibition curator: Una Popović Organisation and PR: Senka Ristivojević Exhibition set up: MoCA Technical Staff (Vlada Vidaković • Dejan Klajić • Nikola Cvetković • Dragan Stošić • Zoran Jakovljević • Saša Sarić)

Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade For the publisher: Slobodan Nakarada, acting director Catalogue editor: Una Popović Publication collaborator: Branka Benčić Writers: Una Popović • Branka Benčić • Aneta Stojnić • Jelena Jureša • Christel Stalpaert • Sarah Mendelsohn Translation into English: Viktorija Krombholc • Vesna Brezovac Translation into Serbian: Viktorija Krombholc Translation into Croatian: Vesna Brezovac Proofreading Serbian texts: Maja Vojvodić Proofreading English texts: Viktorija Krombholc • Randall A. Major • Dawn Michelle D’Atri

Photography from the opening and set up: Saša Reljić • Marija Konjikušić [Salon of the MoCA, Belgrade] • Jasenko Rasol [Gallery 90–60–90, Pogon, Zagreb] • Markus Krottendorfer [KM Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz]

Design: Andrej Dolinka printed by: Publikum, Belgrade • 10/2016 print run: 600 isbn 978–86–7101–330–7

Artist and Museum of Contemporary Art wish to thank Milanka Todić and Nikola Šuica

Partner & publication support: exhibition & publication friend: city GALlERIes OSIJEK Fakultetska 7 · 31000 Osijek · croatia 218 219 CIP – Каталогизација у публикацији Народна библиотека Србије, Београд

7.038.53(497.11)”2010/2014” 76.071.1:929 Јуреша Ј.

JELENA Jureša : Mira, skica za portret : [Salon Muzeja savremene umetnosti, Beograd, 15. april – 12. jun 2016.] = Mira, study for a portrait : [Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, April 15 – June 12, 2016] / [autorke tekstova, writers Una Popović ... [et al.] ; prevod na engleski, translation into English Viktorija Krombholc, Vesna Brezovac, prevod na srpski, translation into Serbian Viktorija Krombholc, prevod na hrvatski, translation into Croatian Vesna Brezovac ; fotografije, photography by Saša Reljić ... [et al.]]. – Beograd : Muzej savremene umetnosti = Belgrade : Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016 (Beograd : Publikum). – 217 str. : fotogr. ; 23 cm

Uporedo srp. ili hrv. tekst i engl. prevod. – Podaci o autorima preuzeti iz kolofona. – Tiraž 600. – Biografije: str. 202–211. – Bibliografija uz većinu poglavlja.

ISBN 978-86-7101-330-7 1. Поповић, Уна, 1974– [аутор] a) Јуреша, Јелена (1974–) – „Мира, скица за портрет (пројекат)”

COBISS.SR-ID 226410252