Skip to main content

Jelena Jureša

About Jelena Jureša

Jelena Jureša is a visual artist and filmmaker born in Yugoslavia, in Novi Sad. She has extensively worked with questions of cultural identity, gender, politics of memory, and oblivion through film, video installation, photography and text. In her works, she relates individual stories to collective processes of oblivion and remembrance. She unceasingly questions historical and political narratives and tries to destabilize our ideas of what is true. Over the past several years, her research and focus on practices of oppression—how they operate and implicate us in systems of violence—has resulted in multidisciplinary projects that are, on various levels, as political as they are highly personal.

Jureša’s work has been showcased internationally with solo exhibitions at Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts in Brussels, Künstlerhaus in Graz, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. In 2015, as a Jackman Goldwasser resident artist at the inviation from the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, she started research on the questions and relations of public art – capitalism – patriarchy. As a Q21 artist in residence in Vienna in 2016, she studied the work of anthropologists and racial hygienists during the Austrian imperial period, along with post-WWII politics of oblivion in Austria.

Jureša’s film project, ‘Aphasia,’ which detects positions of power, racism, injustice, and violence from Belgian colonialism, Austrian anti-Semitism to the atrocities in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian wars was supported by VAF (Flanders Audiovisual Fund) and co-commissioned by Contour. ‘Aphasia’ has been showcased at various international venues, including Manifesta Biennial, Contour Biennial, Argos in Brussels, Kunstverein in Hamburg, BAK – basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, Budapest Gallery, Display in Prague, Maxim Gorki in Berlin, Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, Cinematek in Brussels, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Fotomuseum in Antwerpen, De Cinema in Antwerp (MHKA), Doc Lisboa, and received the main award at the 23rd Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. Since 2021, the ‘Aphasia’ video installation has been included in the permanent collection of the Flemish Community and MuZEE.
Continuing her research and her collaboration with the musicians and performers from the film (Alen and Nenad Sinkauz, Ivana Jozić), Jureša conceptualized and directed an eponimous concert-performance, which premiered at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels in 2022 and continues touring.

Jureša teaches at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) and holds a Ph.D. in arts from Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy and KASK. In 2017, she was granted a two-year artistic research project at KASK for ‘Unfolding Amnesia: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Artistic Practices and the Politics of Oblivion,’ and in 2020, a post-doctoral research position for ‘Revolt! On a Refusal to Sing—Thinking Resistance Through Music, Waste, and Complicity.’

Contact: juresa.jelena(at)gmail(dot)com