Ivana Jurić

KO’LAŽ

19.5. – 5.6.2016.

Exhibition opening: 19.5.2016. at 7pm

A well-known and well-used literary method is the reconstruction of vague childhood memories through a free, associative enumeration of images, because live images are precisely what was ripped from a wider context and they are the only memories from the first years of our life. Images that dominate over the narrative content behind them, are also the foundation of the forms of art called visual arts, and therefore I will not look for or reconstruct explanations behind the scenes in Ivana Jurić’s film Déjà vu, which shows dolls in the landscape, although there certainly is a link with some of her concrete experiences. However, if we turn our attention to a more general level, to symbols and archetypes, as well as to the formal procedures the author uses in order to evoke memories, we will see not only an intimate story, which becomes lost in its insignificance among the intimate stories of billions of people, but also an artistic articulation of consciousness, which we can immerse into and which speaks to us. In fact, if we enter the swamp the artist shows, we might see our own memories, fears or fascinations.  

Fragmented, non-fluid frames of the film suggest the fragmentation of memory, time lag in which past experiences turn into images of uncertain authenticity and where the imaginary mixes with the experienced. When the non-existent and subjectively defined consciousness is often the only warrantor that something really happened, we may ask ourselves whether there is any difference between real and imaginary past. Similar intermittence of impressions and visions is also present in the exhibited collages, and which, due to various collaged images, of different origin and age, can also be seen as the essence of experienced and, above all, observed sensations. Film music composed and played by Kruno Domaćinović on electric guitar, with its long tones, does not suggest the feeling of threat lurking from the swamp the dolls in the film stroll through, as much as a huge life energy, passion and Eros, hidden within them, behind their innocent and chubby faces. They are in the field, in the woods and the abovementioned swamp, soaking in the wonderful and frightening world around them. In such climates the life flourishes, and transforms from one form into another. It is impossible to think that the silent protagonists do not feel that flourishing in all their whole plastic bodies.

Similar transformations and mutations can be seen in two large Talismans, hanging sculptures, also made of dolls, this time dismembered or treated like African idols which tribes insert pins through so they would take on all the evil that is supposed to strike an individual or a community. Ancient superstitions and ritual or psychological practices, from tribal shamanism and voodoo magic, to children’s games, where the depictions of beings play the roll of the being itself, also resonate in these works. The chaos the dolls are immerged into (in the film and sculpture) is an attempt to establish communication with the forces of nature, attempt to blend with their cruel order, in which life, death and pain have their place and are accepted without appeal. Only in the encounter with wilderness (the real, external one, suggested by the swamp, and the internal, creative one, the whole exhibition is a symbol of) man can fully become aware of himself in this cruel world.

The need to habituate oneself with this indifferent, but also extremely dangerous hundred-headed Hydra we call the natural order, as opposed to the civilized life of a contemporary man, was accentuated in the works of Jack London and D. H. Lawrence, and it is also the motive of John Brooman’s film Deliverance (from 1972). However, our culture, and all its fruits, were created while fighting that Hydra and by successfully conquering it. In this ordered world the law penalizes the escalations of dark passions (at least formally strives to), and the comfort we achieved made life easier and longer. However, in our consciousness there are still atavisms, from the times we lived “in harmony with nature“, as romanticists and environmentalists would say. It was a bloody harmony however, full of rape, slaughter, death and disease, but it still left significant traces of violent impulses, or genetic adaptations to such a world, which Sigmund Freud called the uneasiness in culture. Ivana Jurić’s works draw these never forgotten instincts to the surface, allowing our dark aesthetic fascination with them. Any story is irrelevant here.

The author would sometimes add the elements of folk costumes from Slavonia to the babies in the film and the ones amassed on Talismans, and this is the only indicator of her childhood, that initial motivation for this exhibition. The scenography of Kopački Rit, with blues soundtrack, reminds more of the Mississippi Delta, which is also the element that raises these works above narrow local framework. Similar landscapes create similar emotional frameworks, similar memories and traumas, that transcend time and spatial distance, and sometimes, creatively expressed, create intriguing works of art.

 

Feđa Gavrilović

Ivana Jurić was born in 1982. In 2008 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Animated Film and New Media. She won the 2nd ESSL ART AWARD CEE and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb Award for her outstanding success during studies and thesis work. In 2012 her film “The Room“ was shown on ARTE TV, and included in the programme of New Directors/New Films in MoMA. It also won the Grand Prix at the Festival of Croatian Animated Film. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions and participated in many festivals of animated film in Croatia and abroad. She is a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association and Croatian Association of Artists in Zagreb.

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic Croatia

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Dom hrvatskih likovnih umjetnika
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