Jelena Jureša
About Jelena Jureša
Jelena Jureša is a visual artist and filmmaker, born in Novi Sad (in Yugoslavia). She has extensively worked with questions of cultural identity, collective violence and complicity, politics of memory, and oblivion through expanded cinema, photography and text. 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.
Her 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 in collaboration with the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, she started her research on the questions and relations of public art – capitalism – patriarchy, as well as the production of male and female histories within this context. 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. Her film project ‘Aphasia’, which detects a thread of positions of power, racism, injustice, and violence from Belgian colonialism, Austrian anti-Semitism to the atrocities in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian wars, was co-commissioned by Contour Biennale, where it was shown in 2019 and featured in the 2022 Manifesta Biennale. ‘Aphasia’ has been showcased at various international venues, including 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 in Prague. In 2021 ‘Aphasia’ became part of the Flemish Community permanent collection. Continuing the line of meticulous research and her collaboration with the performers from the film she conceptualised and directed eponymous concert-performance, which premiered at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels in 2022. The performance emerged out of praxical research geared towards devising new strategies for ensuring the embodied involvement of the spectator, addressing issues related to group dynamics, obedience to authority, and polarization.
Jureša teaches at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent. She holds a Ph.D. in Arts from Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy and KASK. Since 2020, she has been working on her post-doctoral research project titled ‘Revolt! On a Refusal to Sing—Thinking Resistance Through Music, Waste, and Complicity.’