Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 14 Pariska St.

April 15th 2016 – June 12th 2015, every day from 12 to 8pm, except Tuesdays

(opening of the exhibition on Friday at 7pm)

Curator of the exhibition: curator of the Salon of the MoCA Una Popović.

Accompanying program:

– Saturday, April 16 at 6pm – a talk with the artist Jelena Jureša and Aneta Stojnić, theoretician of art and media (Faculty for Media and Communication, Belgrade). The topic of the discussion will be work “Mira, Study for a Portrait”, as well as author’s re-examination of the boundaries of memory and politics of historisation. The moderator of the talk is Una Popović.

The work Mira, Study for a Portrait can be described as a multimedia pseudo biographical work, following the life of an unknown woman Mira and her family, from the period before her birth until her tragic death. By way of archive material, photographs and video, used and combined within a specifically considered model of presentation, a family history of Bosnian Jews, Mira’s ancestors is  revived, which went through the most cruel ordeal in the camps on the territory of former Yugoslavia.  At first glance, we may well think about a biography of a woman and a country, as well as documenting of an epoch. Yet, this seems to Albeit an illusion, as the geography of time in this piece is rather specific. photographs and videos still suggest the places which a viewer visits time and again while watching a video installation, its meaning is complemented each and every time with new events and histories.

The exhibition in the Salon is the first presentation of a project in Belgrade that took years to make. Immersion two-channel video installation seems to be dominating the gallery space, being the basis of the piece, followed by a series of accompanying photos.

The exhibition catalogue, conceived by a reader as for the motif of this piece, will be published by the end of exhibition. The catalogue will contain the texts by Una Popović (Curator at MoCA), Branka Benčić (independent curator from Zagreb),  Christel Stapler, Professor of Theatre, Performance and Media Studies at the University of Gent, Sarah Mendelsohn (multimedia artists from USA), as well as correspondence between Anita Stojnić (theoretician of art and media, Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade) and the artist. The partner in the realization of this publication is City Gallery Osijek.

Jelena Jureša deals with the politics of identity and memory in her work. The focus of her work is based on the relationship between a viewer and the viewed, as well as representational power(lessness) of “an image”. In her work, this artist critically assesses history, studies archive material, researches the truth on the margins of representation and confronts private memory and fates with the political and historical narratives. Currently, she lives in Gent (Belgium), where she is working on her PhD, focussing on the politics of memory and oblivion in Europe in the 20th century, on the Faculty for Art and Philosophy at the University of Gent and KASK Conservatory.