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Jelena Jureša

Jelena Jureša (born 1974, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Ghent, Belgium.

Biography

Jelena Jureša graduated at the Art Academy of Novi Sad. She worked as an assistant professor at the Art Department of the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad. In 2014 she moved to Belgium. She holds a PhD in arts from Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, and KASK & Conservatorium. In 2017, she was granted a research project at KASK School of Arts for Unfolding Amnesia: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Artistic Practices and the Politics of Oblivion. She is affiliated with KASK School of Arts where she is developing her project Revolt! On a Refusal to Sing—Thinking Resistance Through Music, Waste and Complicity (2020-2026).

Career

Jelena Jureša has been extensively engaged with the ways in which national identity is constructed, the mechanisms of the politics of memory and oblivion through moving image, photography, and text. Her practice involves a long term in-depth research. In 2020, after her solos at Argos, centre for visual arts, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien and Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade,Jelena Jureša was invited by KAAP to direct a performance based on her Aphasia film project. The performance will premiere in 2022. Jureša was nominated to several international residencies, among them the Jackman Goldwasser resident artist 2015 at the invitation by the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. As an artist in residence at Q21 in Vienna 2016, she studied the work of anthropologists and racial hygienists of the Austrian imperial period at The ÖsterreichischeMediathek, Phonogrammarchiv, Naturhistorisches Museum and Weltmuseum .

Aphasia (2019 - ongoing)

Jelena Jureša's latest film project interweaves the history of lens-based media and its use in creating collective and national identity during and after the crimes that led to colonial genocide, the Holocaust, and the mass murders during the civil war in Yugoslavia. This experimental feature documentary focuses on the absurdity that arises from the collective silence surrounding crime and the compartmentalization of historical events.   


"The chilling film Aphasia by the Serbian Jelena Jureša shows that decolonization, together with awareness of the dominant Western perspective, can collide with discomfort or silence. She intertwines three stories about the violence of a state and its collective suppression: Belgian colonialism, the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Jureša razor-sharply analyzes the role that modern visual culture and media technology have played in Western imperialism. In the most personal part of the film, she tells of a chance meeting with a popular DJ, years after the end of the war. The horrifying anecdote revealed here illustrates Hannah Arendt's thesis on the banality of evil. "Who has the freedom to forget? Who has the right to speak?”

— Ils Huygens for de Witte Raaf.

Ubundu (2019)

Ubundu is a film poem inspired by the writings of W.G. Sebald and his comments on the “ugliness of Belgium” as a result of emerging amnesia and the participation of all Belgians in the exploitation of Congolese resources. Antwerp Zoo and the European railway system have an important place in Sebald’s writing: the expansion of the railways enabled the development of capitalist production and transnational transport, becoming the symbol of their age, whilst also enabling mass deportations and genocide. Because of her intention to incorporate Sebald’s phrase about the "Ugliness of Belgium" in her new work, Juresa has been declined official permission to film the Okapi at Antwerp Zoo. She filmed it with a Bolex 16mm camera.. In 2021, Mu.ZEE purchased Ubundu for its public collection.

Mira, Study for a Portrait (2010-2014)

Through the multimedia project entitled Mira, Study for a Portrait, Jelena Jureša examines the possibility of multilayer photographic and micro-narratives and construction of postmemory of a Balkan family.

"In Jureša’s work memorialization occurs through absence, by looking at something else—not exactly remnants, but expressions of what is left behind. Several years in the making, this project 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 ‘unsayable’ or ‘incomprehensible’ is equivalent to euphemein, to adoring in silence, as one does with a god.”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."

— Sara Mendelsohn for OpenSpace

Exhibitions and Screenings

Selected exhibitions & screenings

• 2020 The exhibition Not Fully Human, Not Human at All,  Kunstverein, Hamburg curated by Nataša Petrešin Bachelez and Sabine Steinbrügge looks into processes of dehumanization that are taking place in Europe.
• 2020 Curated program at DocLisboa, Festival International de Cinema - Doclisboa '20, Lisbon focusing on the work of the artist Jelena Juresa
• 2020 The 3rd Industrial Art Biennial (IAB): Ride into the Sun, Rijeka
• 2020 Who Has the Freedom to Forget? - conversation with Galit Eilat and Erden Kosova, BI'BAK, within Art in Dark Times (20.05.2020 to 30.11.2020)
• 2020 UBUNDU - ART IN DARK TIMES, BI’BAK, Berlin Art Week, curated by Galit Eilat and Erden Kosova
• 2020 Reflections of our time: Acquisitions of the Museum of Contemporary Art 1993-2019, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
• 2019  Contour 9 Biennial, Coltan as Cotton, Mechelen
• 2019 Leap and Dive - Identity of Female Artists in (New)media Practice, Museum of Contemporary Art, Novi Sad.
• 2019 Without Anesthesia, 54. Zagreb Salon, HDLU Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb
• 2019 Artist Cinema: Aphasia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
• 2019 Aphasia, 23rd JiHlava IDFF (main award)
• 2019 APHASIA in the frame of DISSENT! Cinema of Politics, Politics of CInema, an initiative of ARGOS,
• 2019 Aphasia, Argos-Centre for Art and Media, Brussels
• 2018  Song, Out of Sight, Antwerp

Publications

Aphasia. Texts by Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, Branka Benčić, Barbara Matejčić, Rolf Quaghebeur, Asa Mendelsohn and Jelena Jureša. Published by Argos, KASK, MER. Borgerhoff & Lamberigts. 
2019. ISBN 978 94 6393 042 0

Mira Study For A Portrait, Fotohof edition 2014-Vol 194. Published by Fotohof. 
ISBN 978-3-902675-94-1

Mira Study For A Portrait, Reader. Texts by Branka Benčić, Una Popović, Christel Stalpaert, Aneta Stojnić and Jelena Jureša. Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 
In collaboration with the City Galleries, Osijek, 2016. ISBN 978-86-7101-330-7

What It Feels Like For A Girl, Texts by Suzana Milevska and Milanka Todić. Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina 
Co-publisher: Fund for the Development of Investigative Journalism and New Media – FORIN, 2014. ISBN 978-86-84773-56-4 2