Former Yugoslavian artist, Dragana Jurišić, who has been based in Dublin for almost twenty years, has developed a beautiful and complex body of work that has been exhibited widely across Europe. Art histories and familial histories are key sources of material for her text, installation and photographic pieces. These themes are most evident in the two series of work for which she is best known: My Own Unknown and YU: The Lost Country, which have toured internationally.
Anneka French discusses these two major projects with Jurišić within the contexts of geo-political and personal identities.
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AF: Family histories are threaded throughout your work. Can you tell me more about why you return them so frequently?
DJ: Using starting points that are familiar and then delving into all the unknowns contained in these relationships is the most natural way for me to work, progressing from the personal to the universal. In My Own Unknown I started with the life of Gordana Čavić, a family member who was allegedly a spy in Paris during the Cold War, and used her story as a vessel to talk about the validity of history, especially when considering that the lives of women like her were erased from it. I am fascinated with how little we know about ourselves and also how unwilling and scared we are to learn about who we are, how we were formed and how we might grow.
AF: What bought you to Dublin? How does the unique context of the city and of the Republic of Ireland impact upon your practice?
DJ: I came to Dublin in 1999 escaping the political situation in Croatia that was skirting closer and closer to fascism. I had no desire to misspend my youth in a country that had refused to take responsibility for the carnage that happened in the 1990s and was peddling nationalism as the only way to be. In retrospect, I am glad I left because things have not improved in the former Yugoslavia in the last two and a half decades. Ireland had its challenges in the late 1990s when I arrived. There was a lot of mistrust towards immigrants. I experienced racism for the first time in my life in Ireland, which is interesting when you think about this in the context of someone who has left their country because of the hatred and animosity between different ethnic groups. But there was also an incredible warmth and decency here I had not experienced before. And that is what prevailed. I like its crazy weather; it’s good for putting your head down and working. Ireland has provided me with a safe space to make sense of my trauma by making work and writing about it.
from YU: The Lost Country series © Dragana Jurisic
AF: In recent years, you have primarily shown two bodies of work, My Own Unknown and YU: The Lost Country, that have toured internationally. How does the work develop for each different presentation?
DJ: YU: The Lost Country is more rigid in terms of presentation than My Own Unknown. There is a core work that contains around 50 photographs presented in quite a linear format that follows my journey through the former Yugoslavia chronologically. Depending on the space, I include different elements in the exhibition such as book works and video. At the recent exhibition in Noorderlicht Gallery in Holland, adjacent to the two main exhibition spaces, there were three anterior spaces. In one I showed my film I remember. In the second room we showed the work by Michal Iwanowski who accompanied me on my journey and documented it from a point of view of someone observing the observer. In the third space was a work by Emma Döbken who looked at Yugoslavia from the point of a view of an outsider and someone born after the ‘civil’ war of the 1990s. Only the exhibition in Barcelona curated by Natasha Christia was markedly different, insofar as the curator decided to show a deconstructed YU book. The My Own Unknown series, on the other hand, changes in terms of content and presentation with each new installation. As more information comes to light, the work shape-shifts.
from My Own Unknown series, 2016 © Dragana Jurisic
AF: How do you select figures from art history (such as L’Inconnue de la Seine) or art historical motifs to make work from? Why are you drawn to these?
DJ: I am drawn to nameless females. If you take a walk through the national gallery of any country, unlike male portraits that are mostly named, the amount of anonymous women is quite something. I remember being puzzled about the identity of these women from an early age. Why were they left nameless? I always considered the act of naming something as evidence of care and respect, so I wondered why the artists chose not to. What does that tell us about the power relationships between the artist and his female muse? In regard to art historical motifs such as the female nude, one of the biggest clichés of the Western art tradition, I was curious if there was an alternative to what we see reproduced through millennia by the masters’ hands. And I believe that there is, like in the case of 100 Muses, where women were given both directorial and editorial power, where consent is something that is always open to change, and where the artist becomes a facilitator rather than a maker.
from My Own Unknown series, 2015 © Dragana Jurisic
AF: What are your longer-term ambitions for these two series of works? Do you feel they will ever be complete?
DJ: YU: The Lost Country is semi-locked in terms of core work. There might be new additions made in the future but it’s not in focus at present. My Own Unknown, however, is constantly expanding and changing. As more information comes to the forefront, as new lines of investigation open up, the work changes form. My desire for YU is that the book gets republished. When I published YU: The Lost Country in July 2015, it sold out in a space of three months, so it really had not much of shelf life. I constantly get emails from people from all over the world as to where can they buy the book. It would be nice if it was in circulation again. I am also working on a book that is a part of My Own Unknown, but as it appears, I am quite adamant this will take a shape of a novel, rather than another photobook like YU. I enjoy crossing the borders between disciplines. It’s in these in-between spaces that I feel most at home.
AF: What will you be working on next?
DJ: I am currently working together with Irish poet Paula Meehan on a book about a (in)famous Dublin tenement building, 14 Henrietta Street. The book is tentatively titled Museum and it’s commissioned by Dublin City Council. I am also trying to make sense of social media with a work that is at its very beginnings, titled The Time of Empty Angels. After the novel is completed, I hope to switch my attention to a spaghetti western movie that I have wanted to make for the past five years.
Commissioned and published by Photomonitor, January 2019
Anneka French 