Milanka Todic, JELENA JURESA, What It Feels Like for a Girl, Beograd 2010

8/14/2019 Milanka Todic, JELENA JURESA, What It Feels Like for a Girl, Beograd 2010

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What It Feels Like for a Girl / Jelena Juresa

2010.

Critics Have Chosen 2010

Milanka Todic


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What It Feels Like for a Girl / Jelena Juresa

2010.


Milanka Todic


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2 3

Critics Have Chosen is an exhibition which has been organised

at the Fine Arts Gallery of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade since 1969.

Already a traditional event, in the course of which art historians and

fine arts critics present the aspects and the framework of the current

fine arts production on the Serbian scene at the beginning of each

exhibition season, this exhibition has realised its basic aim by capturing

the attention of experts and art aficionados alike. Since the year 2001, it

has been modified into an authorial exhibition presented by the winners

of theLazar Trifunovi Awardfor fine arts criticism.

Milanka Todi is the recipient of theLazar Trifunovi Awardfor

the year 2006.

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Milanka Todic


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4 5, 22. , 2005.

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Paris, September 22, 2005

Metro No. 7, Palais Royal station

On the seat across from mine I notice a woman in her early forties, gazing

thoughtfully in front of her, while a dog is dozing at her fe et. Shes wearing

sandals with silky straps tied around her ankles, which makes the whole figure of

this tall, strong-featured woman unusually appealing. Im staring at her. I wish to

photograph her.

I ask her for permission. She consents with a smile, although she doesnt

understand, as she modestly admits, why I find her so interesting.

Her name is Delphine. The dogs name is Rober to.

Everything comes to a st andstill. Unexpectedly. You can hear the silence.

Delphine puts her fingers in the shape of the let terH, then points her thumb

forward imitating the letterI, and finally raises two fingers in the shape ofV.

Oh, yes, says she, I forgot something, crossing her fingers to form the shape

of a plu s (+).

The noise is unbearable the metro is shaking like mad I see a crowd of people

pushing towards the door of the car. I cant move, I have to sit down. I sit down

next to her.

Delphine is HIV positive. She explains that now I know what no one else knows.

Or what everyone else knows, she says quietly, more like to herself.

She asks me to take a picture of Rober to. Roberto isnt going to live much

longer. She wants me to send her the photographs. Shes writing down my name:

Yelena.

A new roll of film.

Perhaps I should have stayed.

Tears.

A baptism of fire.

Paris, September 23, 2005

I have the photographs developed at the nearest photo laboratory.

I spread them out on the f loor looking for the portrait of the person

with whom I spent thirty minutes that were so important to me.

She is in each photograph.

And she is in none of them.

Im putting the photographs away in a drawer.

Thats how it started.


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8 9

Face to FaceMilanka Todic

We look before we speak; we see and then hear. These are the principles according to which

we grow up, behave and function a s individualities in a culture of massive media images.

As the first medium of the technical reproduction of images, especially in the era of mobile

phones and small but powerful digital cameras, photography offers everyone a chance to

visualize their view of the world through a medium and tear it out of temporal and spatial

continuity. All these images are so conspicuous and assertive that no one wonders anymore

if they understand them or if they know how to interpret them correctly. Not so long ago,

when he returned from his trip to Africa, Rastko Petrovic warned that a photograph is a

constructed and culturally coded image and that the black man, unaccustomed to decoding

visual signs, could not even recognize his own son in a photograph.

In the mass industry of media images and a world which cannot be ruled by territorial

conquest anymore but by the adoption of the field of perception, as Paul Virilio says,

the most difficult thing is to find ones own, creative, point of view from which one can

perceive and then photograph that world. For Jelena Juresa and her research project

entitled What It Feels Like for a Girl, the decisive moment was a chance encounter in a

Paris metro in 2005. If each one of us is at the same time the object and the subject, the

observer and the observed, the photographed, the question can be raised of what it feels

like to be a photographer. What It Feels Like for a Photographercould be the subtitle

of this essay.

Documentary photography, as well as all traditional genre classifications known in media

history, have been called into question in the last few decades, not only due to the advent

of the digital camera and computer programmes for generating images. At the end of

the twentieth century, it seemed that reportages could only be made about the shocking

destruction of war, or for commercial and advertising campaigns. Only a few authors,

and Jelena Juresa is certainly among them, have chosen the photographic image as a

framework for their serious research on the self-perception of women in the cultural

context of a transitional society.

In the studious, intertextual and intersubjective featWhat It Feels Like for a Girl, Jelena

Juresa used the photographic image in a radically new way, without yielding to either

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10 11journalistic sensationalism or artistic perfection. Her decision not to change the initial

technical and technological position during years of work on the chosen subject, and

to stick to the primitive Holga camera, even after getting out of the Parisian metro

which was shaking like mad, represents only one of the moments which adequately

illustrate her determination in carrying out the authorial idea. If, at the moment she got

permission to photograph a stranger with a dog in the Parisian metro, the author was

in imperfect conditions, and all conditions outside the comfort of a photographic studio

are seen as such, she has kept this deficiency as a specific quality in all her subsequent

photo sessions with other women. What seemed like a technological flaw carried within it

qualitatively significant advantages which, after all, marked the entire project. Namely,

the technical imperfection of the camera, manifest in the insufficient sharpness as well as

blurred corners, provides a number of challenges, among which one should emphasize the

spontaneity and immediacy of communication with t he chosen models. The leisurely and

relaxed way in which the women look into the camera behind which there is yet another

woman, not a man, represents something entirely different from the ar tificial

and pretentious assertiveness advocated by commercial photography.

It has been shown that, today as well as during the first decades of photography, the act

of photographing, when devoid of big spotlights and long hours of posing and artificial

smiles, can re-establish the r uined aura, the absence of which Walter Benjamin associated

with the industrial technology of photography production. When it is almost painless and

reminiscent of a simple exchange of glances in the presence of a camera, as the portraits of

Jelena Juresa show, taking photographs can establish not only the physical aura for which

the specific type of camera is responsible, as was the case in the past after all, but also the

metaphysical one.

Communication and intersubjectivity, that is, a modest exchange of energy between the

model and the artist is very difficult to transfer to any medium of representation. Good

portraitists are, thus, talked about with special reverence. Jelena Juresa consciously

eliminated from the focus anything that would turn ones attention away from the

portrayed model, reducing representation solely to women belonging to different age,

social and cultural settings. There are no exalted postur es or chosen representative

sceneries as the focus is on the position of the female subject in todays world. In a way,

all those different women can be synthesized into a possible status of every woman today.

For that reason, all the girls/women in the projectWhat It Feels Like for a Girlhave been

given the same frame, that is, have been cut or torn out of concrete reality. In the ascetic

and disciplined take of Jelena Juresa the accent is shifted from the flattering interest in

the female face to th e fragmented body, which significantly distinguishes this approach

from most other strategies known in contemporar y photography.

Conservative and professional photographers almost invariably place the perfection of

the craft in the foreground and then t he value of the photograph as goods, instead of the

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12 13models individuality. They do not search for e xperiments so determinedly and are not

interested in explorations in the visual and media fields in the way an artistic photographer

is. Professionals submit to the perfection of the chosen technical tools, of ten in place of

a personalized dialogue with the model and p ersonal imagination. Unlike them, Jelena

Juresa, like Paula Miklosevic Muhr, Lise Sarfati and many other contemporary authors,

neglects the technical aspect s in favour of the ritual and communicational qualities of

photography. The series of twenty portraits taken by Jelena Juresa was based on these

principles. The media or the photographic attention shifts from the beauties and

famous heroines towards the margins, or to put it more precisely, towards real women

who live self-consciously. Instead of the stereotypical cover girl, the focus is on a

personalized portrait of a woman.

As documentary photography is being quest ioned, it is difficult to determine it s aims now,

if even the most fundamental principle of every photograph this happened is called into

question due to the software for producing photographs. By opting for the so-called pure

photography, Jelena Juresa decided to develop her photographic practice according to the

guidelines of the avant-garde. Use photography as a weapon! advised John Heartfield

in 1929.

Nowadays, giving up the false and pretentious aesthetics of the Pink TV cultur e, which

reaches well beyond the advertising pages of magazines and paid time on TV, in favour

of simple shots featuring portraits of anonymous middle-class women is equal to a

revolutionary turn. If social identity is constituted through our appearance, as agents

paid to project ones image claim, it is clear at f irst sight that th e book and the exhibition

of Jelena Juresa are about girls from the neighbourhood and the women we meet every

day, instead of famous and well-known people. Their appearance, or more precisely, their

photographs do not show happiness, wealth or power. They are not a confirmation of

successfully performed surgical interventions on the body, either, but a visual testimony

of female individuality here and now. They are photographic images of Nada, Aleksandra,

Milena, Biljana, Vlatka, Jelena, twenty of them altogether who declare themselves as

individualities as well as synthetic types of a transitional culture.

Since the photographic portrait, just like any photograph, is a pure coincidence, bearing

in mind that each portrait synthesizes more than an instant lo ok is of key importance,

as well. Therefore, although photographing with the Holga is miles away from t raumatic

posing in a studio, it is not devoid of the tension so accurately descr ibed by Roland Barthes

in Camera Lucida: Beyond doubt, metaphorically speaking, my survival depends on the

photographer. This dependence, however, is not purely imaginary; I noticed it in a feeling

of apprehension of vague origins: a photograph a photograph of me is going to become

now: will it deliver me as an unpleasant person or a handsome guy? What someone

will look like in a photo is always very uncertain, for both the portrayed person and the

photographer. The certainty is intensified by the realization that, once put in a frame

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14 15and frozen, the photograph exists independently and for much longer than the physical

existence of the person port rayed, which is why it is necessary to articulate the visual

message of the photograph well.

In essence, while observing pictures, f irst of all phot ographs, mediated by the medium,

a mental image is created of the portrayed persons social status. Even though the

photographs of Jelena Juresa show only a fragmentary image and merely an ephemeral

aspect of each portrayed person, we tend to accept the coincidence as definitive.

However, every body is marked by history and the particularities of its existence, of which

the photograph says nothing. Hence Susan Sontags accurate remark that the caption is the

photographs missing voice. The caption, even the scantiest one, will anchor the meaning

of the photograph in a certain social or cultural narrative and provide it with spatial and

temporal coordinates. Finally, the series of female portraits in t he project of Jelena Juresa

can be understood and interpreted only when the text and image simultaneously overlap.

At the moment when the visual message is supported by the te xtual one, the process of

reading and interpreting can begin, or even better, the decoding of the pictogram t he

photographic image.

The need to discuss photographs and to find an additional explanation for each one is

exciting precisely because many photographs tell us nothing and they do it perfectly well.

Thousands of photographs pass entirely unnoticed before our eyes every day when we only

flick through newspapers and search the Internet pages. Seen outside the context and

text, the photographic image treasures the merely accidental likeness to the por trayed

person or the depicted event. The photographic portrait, as well as all other v isual signs,

does not necessarily refer to the essence of human existence. Therefore, it is important

to point out that in the projectWhat It Feels Like for a Girlby Jelena Juresa photography is

chosen as the visual medium of research, not only of repres entation, of the position of the

female subject in contemporary culture.

The strategy of this research required functional multimediality in order for the chosen

topic to be logically viewed from different angles. The complex dialogue between imageand word, or more precisely, the visual-textual-audio narrative was the corner stone for

work on this project. Jelena Juresa successfully created the projected interte xtuality

and multimediality. Each one of the three media and levels of meaning mentioned

photograph, language, voice manifests different procedures of inscribing and

branding the female body in the projectWhat It Feels Like for a Girl.

If discussing personal destinies is a taboo, especially in a society of spectacle and

consumerism which aggressively emphasizes scenarios of pleasure and happiness via

the powerful entertainment industry, then Jelena Juresa has taken a radical turn in the

public representation of intimate contents and used photography as a weapon. In the

articulation of this series of portraits, she gave up on the established iconography and

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16 17typology of sweet femininity which would be based on the allusive messages of various

attributes such as mirrors, lace, flowers, etc. She also ignored the well-known reper toire

of the stereotypical representations of femininity, ranging from sentimental helplessness

to seductive glamour. Shocking feminist strategies also proved unnecessary for the

formulation of her authentic attitude by which she readily shared the authorial position

with all the other personalized narratives female stories which can be read, as well as

heard.

If Jelena Juresa is behind the entire project, not only behind the photographic portraits,

then the other twenty author s are behind its textual animation. The function of each

woman in the work What It Feels Like for a Girlwas two-fold from the position of the

subject and that of the object. The women, the models as objec ts of the photographs, were

denied agency in the visual aspect, but they got it back in the narrative and audio aspect s.

As the objects of the phot ographs, the women did not lose their voices in the other, media,

lives. Thanks to the audio aspect of the work, t hey all avoided the fate of the beautiful

mermaid who willingly gives up her voice for the life of an ordinary woman, though with a

prince. On the contrary, all the women portrayed are active participants in th e art project

and their personal stories shape the textual and audio aspect s of Jelenas multimedia work.

On the whole, all the work on shaping the project can be interpret ed as what Foucault

called the techniques of per sonal self-production.

The individual stories, as well as t he individual photographs/portraits, were carefully

sought for and even more carefully articulated as the func tional elements of the new

structure of meaning, the hypertex t. Discussing the complex relations between the image,

text and speech, that is, the photograph, language and voice, would be too demanding

now, but it is enough to point out the fact that meanings constant ly flow from one system

of representation to another in this three-layered media structure. The outside the

photograph focuses on becomes the inside as one goes through t he rhetoric of the printed

text in What It Feels Like for a Girl. For the second time, after encountering the stor y

narrated in the first person, in the book t he observer is face to face with the image which is

again questioned and constituted in relation to the caption, the verbal message read. This

play of image and text is completed by speech. The sound of the voice does and does not

depend on the other two systems: the visual and the t extual. The recorded voice essentially

erases the borders between these two het erogeneous media with its assertive existence

in the present. Namely, the audio always refers to the present while the photograph and

printed text belong to the past. Live speech figures, therefore, as the third system

of representation and meaning in the complex project ofWhat It Feels Like for a Girl,

providing the dialectical relation between image and text with its final synthesis.

The outside, at least the one the photographic portrait reveals, is and is not the inside of

the intimate story. There is also the voice, asserting itself as an actual presence, as the

present shared by the narrator and the observer/listener. Image, text and speech are bound

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18 19together like the pages of a book in the innovative multimedia project by Jelena Juresa.

The projects multimediality requires the polysemy of interpretation, but the interpretation

must at all t imes remain open for new noises or new meanings.

Speaking in the spirit of Derridas theory of logocentrism, speech can be understood as

presence. The speaker whose voice is heard has to be present for th e listener in some way.

The written text accompanying the photographic portraits is a subst itute for the absent

writer or narrator. In the end, the simultaneous presence of speech successfully establishes

communication along the lines reader/listener or the present/the past. The observer, and it

all began with a look through the c amera, laid the foundations of this multimedia pyramid

in which the contours of the metaphysics of presence are r eflected.

The enigma of the visual particularly refers to the female exterior, whose body, according

to some theories, can itself be seen as a text. The metaphor, developed by Jelena Juresa, of

writing and inscribing cultural layers on the body also resembles Derr idas re-created body.

The processes of inscribing on and copying the body do not include only aesthetic and

surgical interventions, diets, exhausting t rainings and body-building, but also all those,

more or less voluntary, actions of up-bringing, education, and then taking photographs,

talking and listening. The body, especially the female body, is the constant object of

observation and re-tailoring. In the era of images mediated by the medium, the very act of

observation can be labelled as a sign of intolerance, and can even be understood as a form

of sexual harassment by looking. The metaphor of the textualised body, as Jelena Juresa

articulates it in the projectWhat It Feels Like for a Girl, is ready to take on and transform

the most diverse messages and meanings. Creating a palimpsest of the female body, or as

Elizabeth Grosz says: a historical chronicle of prior and later traces, some of which have

been effaced, others of which have been emphasized, Jelena Juresa created a work in

which the juxtaposition of image, text and speech remains open for a critical insight into

the mass media representation of the female body. The question of marginality cannot be

raised if the whole project of Jelena Juresa is related to the well-known and impertinent

feminist slogan the personal is the political. The traditional exclusion and suppression

of what is personal from the sphere of t he public, dominated by the media, is radically

reversed by her daring representation and affirmation of female individuality.

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21

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Miroslav was the central figure in my l ife and nothing before him

mattered. Our whole life was determined by the fact that wed

found each other and lived together.

/ Nada


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23

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Food was paramount in our house all my life. My mum was always

on a diet and my dad looks like a model even today. We seemed like

a harmonious family. Everyone in the neighbourhood envied us.

/ Zorana


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25

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I have no regrets. Everything has turned out as it should have.

/ Dragica


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26

1974.

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(What it feels like for a girl

2009,Mozarts 2009).

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Jelena Juresa was born in Novi Sad in

1974, where she finished her studies

at the Academy of Arts. She has

participated in solo and joint exhibitions

in Serbia, France, Croatia and Austria.

During artistic residential stays in Paris

in 2004 and 2005, she created the works

from the Tourists series. In her latest

works, in which she addresses the issue

of gender, that is, cultural identity, the

narrative is in the foreground and is

united with the image in the form of a

textual or auditory record (What It Feels

Like for a Girl2009,Mozarts 2009).

Her visual research is based on the

exploration of the communicational

qualities of the image. Her work focuses

on the portrait, through which she

examines the relationship between

the observer and the observed via the

given possibility of understanding the

portrayed subject and problematizing

the question of what the image does or

does not convey.

The photographic image is the starting

point of her creative consideration of

the portrait, irrespective of whether the

medium is photography, video or an

audiovisual installation.

Biography

Jelena Juresa


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28 / Publisher

/Cultural Centre of Belgrade

/ Acting of behalf of the publisher

, /Mr Marina urevi, manager

/ Fine Arts Gallery

6/I, /Knez Mihailova 6/I, Belgradewww.kcb.org.rs

2010 /Critics Have Chosen 2010 /Milanka Todi

What It Feels Like For a Girl /Jelena Juresa13 30. 1. 2010.

, 528 /Contemporary Trends Series, volume 528

/ Gallery Council

, ,

/ Goranka Mati, Aleksandra Estela Bjelica Mladenovi, Zoran Gavri

/ Curator

/ Aleksandra Estela Bjelica Mladenovi

/ Proofreading

,

/ Vlastimira Stankovi, Radmila Lackovi

/ Translation

- /Arijana Luburi-Cvijanovi

/ Technical staff

, , ,

/ Slavoljub iri, Drago Radulovi, Dragan Nikoli, Dejan Pavi

/ Design

/Veljko Damjanovi

/ Elements for Coverpage

/Predrag Nikoli (Ninja Boy Creations)

/ Printed by

/ Print run

200

/Programmes and projects of the Belgrade Cultural Centre have been supported by the Secretariatfor Culture of the City of Belgrade


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Documents

Milanka Todic, JELENA JURESA, What It Feels Like for a Girl, Beograd 2010