My Own Unknown (2014 - ) is a series by Dragana Jurisic, exploring her identity. Born in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, she is forced to redefine himself while also keeping the memory of her history alive.
She explores the self, much as I am, but in a different area of the self.
Her work isn't perhaps conventional and you can tell it's not made solely for the aethetic but has so much feeling in there too. Sometimes I can't quite decipher what the feeling is but I still look at the imagery in awe. She is capable of making you feel things when you don't know why. She is capable of making you ask questions about yourself.
She has split the work into chapters, and each chapter seems to have completely different imagery inside, yet they are all presented together in an exhibition space.
On her website she clearly separates these chapters yet in an exhibition they merge into one.
In an interviewwith Cphmag, she says;
"The general idea behind My Own Unknown is an attempt to learn about the immensity of what is unknown in ourselves. What we do not know and what we do not understand seems infinite. And understandably, it makes many people scared to even try to look into these shadowy corners of self. So we accept the identities that were pre-made for us, as it is easier, admittedly, than looking into the unknown and possibly unknowable.
My Own Unknown is a personal quest of discovering who I am, why I am here, what my purpose is, and what it is to be female today. The work is primarily for women and about women. The reason it is done in chapters is that I did not want to take a linear trajectory. I felt it would take too long to get to any kind of an answer. So I decided to look at it from different perspectives. Each chapter represents another point of departure but they are all travelling towards the same destination."
This chapter evidently means a lot to the identity of Jurisic herself and her heritage. She has done an in depth series on her heritage and coming from Yugoslavia, in a project called 'YU : The Lost Country'. This work is less about the lost country and more about a more personal look at her aunt.
In the Cphmag interview she says;
"The main protagonists of all the chapters of My Own Unknown are women; my aunt in “She was so beautiful, like she was her own creator” – a woman who desperately wanted to be free, escaped the oppressive system and family (arranged marriage and poverty), only to end up being oppressed again by the same culprits."
The work is represented in many ways, showing prints, notebooks and Polaroids. The images seem beautiful but they're not there for us to understand; the point of My Own Unknown is for Jurisisc to explore her unknown, and if it's unknown to her, we can only make guesses at the meaning of each photograph to her due to it being such a personal project. I don't think that this deters from the work though, because it simply makes me want to know more, just as she does. In a way it's comforting that the artist herself may not know the reasoning behind the images, acting on instinct to discover herself.
The passages in the diaries allow an audience to get to know her aunt too, even though we never met her. We are again put in the same boat as Jurisic, making us feel closer to the artist as it's like we're learning along with her.
The diaries are written in a beautiful way; they're not quite what you'd expect to see in the average person's diary, but more like a poem. She writes in a way that captivates you into the story of her aunt and we start to think of how amazing and mysterious she is.
She's described in such a way, even by people who knew her (quoted in the diary) that makes you think 'Wow, she was a strong woman', and it's admirable. She took charge of herself, from what we know.
In this second chapter she further explores identity, using somebody else's.
"L’Inconnue de la Seine, a young woman who allegedly drowned herself to escape her own torment, ending up as the face of Resusci Anne – a CPR practice doll – nicknamed ‘the most kissed girl in the world’; and in a wider context a nameless anonymous woman many artists have projected imagined identities onto."
"Self-portraits by women artists draw us into the problematics of deciphering the identity that lies behind the social expectation that women present themselves in the public adorned, masked and made up"
While these may not be considered self portraits, I think this is still very much relevant to these images, and we're actually given a physical mask to represent this.
This also ties in with another quote from a book called Auto-Focus ; The Self-Portrait In Contemporary Photography by Susan Bright. She writes;
This chapter is the most famous of them all from this series. There are 100 women, including Jurisic herself, who act as her muses. Designed to help her to understand how she views women, the models were in control of how they used the chair and veil given to them, and they picked the final image of themselves.
To answer her own question 'What are the characteristics of the female gaze?' she responds:
Her quote not only answers her own question but bring a more political and societal context to the images. She comments how women are stripped of control of their own bodies once they become pregnant, referring to the abortion law in Ireland, and how this project allows her to somewhat address these issues. In this project the woman is in control, she is no longer the passive muse for she is given little to no direction from Jurisic, she can represent herself how she wants. In a sense, these are self portraits.
This reminds me of another quote from Mirror Mirror;
"I like to think that in taking up a brush or pen, chisel or camera, women assert a claim to the representation of women (as opposed to woman) that Western culture long ago ceded to male genius and patriarchal perspectives, and that turning to the image in the mirror they take another step towards the elaboration of a sexualised subjected female identity"
These images all work well together to present a unity of women, yet they also shine on their own. They don't rely on the other images to support them or to make them worth anything, but each one stands strong on its own. A combination of 100 strong, beautiful images create a collage that causes an overwhelming sense of adoration, and even motivation to rise against stereotypes and passivity.
She explores the self, much as I am, but in a different area of the self.
Her work isn't perhaps conventional and you can tell it's not made solely for the aethetic but has so much feeling in there too. Sometimes I can't quite decipher what the feeling is but I still look at the imagery in awe. She is capable of making you feel things when you don't know why. She is capable of making you ask questions about yourself.
She has split the work into chapters, and each chapter seems to have completely different imagery inside, yet they are all presented together in an exhibition space.
On her website she clearly separates these chapters yet in an exhibition they merge into one.
In an interviewwith Cphmag, she says;
"The general idea behind My Own Unknown is an attempt to learn about the immensity of what is unknown in ourselves. What we do not know and what we do not understand seems infinite. And understandably, it makes many people scared to even try to look into these shadowy corners of self. So we accept the identities that were pre-made for us, as it is easier, admittedly, than looking into the unknown and possibly unknowable.
My Own Unknown is a personal quest of discovering who I am, why I am here, what my purpose is, and what it is to be female today. The work is primarily for women and about women. The reason it is done in chapters is that I did not want to take a linear trajectory. I felt it would take too long to get to any kind of an answer. So I decided to look at it from different perspectives. Each chapter represents another point of departure but they are all travelling towards the same destination."
This chapter evidently means a lot to the identity of Jurisic herself and her heritage. She has done an in depth series on her heritage and coming from Yugoslavia, in a project called 'YU : The Lost Country'. This work is less about the lost country and more about a more personal look at her aunt.
In the Cphmag interview she says;
"The main protagonists of all the chapters of My Own Unknown are women; my aunt in “She was so beautiful, like she was her own creator” – a woman who desperately wanted to be free, escaped the oppressive system and family (arranged marriage and poverty), only to end up being oppressed again by the same culprits."
The work is represented in many ways, showing prints, notebooks and Polaroids. The images seem beautiful but they're not there for us to understand; the point of My Own Unknown is for Jurisisc to explore her unknown, and if it's unknown to her, we can only make guesses at the meaning of each photograph to her due to it being such a personal project. I don't think that this deters from the work though, because it simply makes me want to know more, just as she does. In a way it's comforting that the artist herself may not know the reasoning behind the images, acting on instinct to discover herself.
The passages in the diaries allow an audience to get to know her aunt too, even though we never met her. We are again put in the same boat as Jurisic, making us feel closer to the artist as it's like we're learning along with her.
The diaries are written in a beautiful way; they're not quite what you'd expect to see in the average person's diary, but more like a poem. She writes in a way that captivates you into the story of her aunt and we start to think of how amazing and mysterious she is.
She's described in such a way, even by people who knew her (quoted in the diary) that makes you think 'Wow, she was a strong woman', and it's admirable. She took charge of herself, from what we know.
In this second chapter she further explores identity, using somebody else's.
"L’Inconnue de la Seine, a young woman who allegedly drowned herself to escape her own torment, ending up as the face of Resusci Anne – a CPR practice doll – nicknamed ‘the most kissed girl in the world’; and in a wider context a nameless anonymous woman many artists have projected imagined identities onto."
This work is, again, so full of emotion. I see sadness in the limp bodies, shame in those who hide their face, yet they're so open and carefree in their nude bodies. It's pride and seclusion at the same time.
The mask acts as a masquerade for the subject, a false identity. The way they hide their faces means that only their raw body and this mask is all we can tell about who they are - nothing. It reflects on how women are told to hide and hide and hide everything throughout their lives, creating an overall masquerade. Yet they, mostly men, want our bodies. They want to stare and look on. That's what we've been taught. And so the woman shows her body, but hides who she is, for the two are not equal.
In a book called Mirror Mirror ; Self-portraits by women artists (2001), author Whitney Chadwick in an essay called How Do I Look? suggests;
"Self-portraits by women artists draw us into the problematics of deciphering the identity that lies behind the social expectation that women present themselves in the public adorned, masked and made up"
While these may not be considered self portraits, I think this is still very much relevant to these images, and we're actually given a physical mask to represent this.
This also ties in with another quote from a book called Auto-Focus ; The Self-Portrait In Contemporary Photography by Susan Bright. She writes;
"The self splits, merges, fractures and becomes so performed and so constructed that nothing authentic remains"
Again, this is in a book about self-portraiture however this particular quote comments on the self as a whole, and so is relevant to this image. Bright is suggesting that because women have been taught over all of these years to be a masked identity, to change who we are, to be better, to be more how others want us to be, even if we don't think we listen, we gradually build up this masquerade until there's nothing left of us.
This of course is just one opinion, however I think it's very relevant to this image series. Women are hiding behind a mask, but not just a mask, a mask of a dead girl. This feels like desperation to not be themselves; why else would you prefer to identify as a corpse? And yet the images are beautiful.
To answer her own question 'What are the characteristics of the female gaze?' she responds:
" I guess the only answer I can provide here is what the characteristic of my own gaze is. I discovered that my gaze is highly maternal. I feel very protective of everyone who participated in the project. Not in a patronizing way of thinking myself as some great mother figure, but in a way that I feel connected to each and every woman who took part. I want them to feel empowered by the experience. My gender probably has a lot to do with the nature of my gaze. The power relationship between an artist and a muse seems primarily to be one of exploitation. The female muse is often seen as passive. And I did not want this to happen with my project. When the hundred women came forward to be photographed nude, I made sure they became active agents in the process and took their representation into their own hands by claiming ownership over their bodies. This is very important in the Irish context. Here we are in 2017, in a first world country in which women are denied their basic human rights to choose. Once we get pregnant; our lives no longer belong to us but to the State; our reproductive choices are taken away from us. One hundred Muses tries in some small way to readdress these and other power issues."
Her quote not only answers her own question but bring a more political and societal context to the images. She comments how women are stripped of control of their own bodies once they become pregnant, referring to the abortion law in Ireland, and how this project allows her to somewhat address these issues. In this project the woman is in control, she is no longer the passive muse for she is given little to no direction from Jurisic, she can represent herself how she wants. In a sense, these are self portraits.
This reminds me of another quote from Mirror Mirror;
"I like to think that in taking up a brush or pen, chisel or camera, women assert a claim to the representation of women (as opposed to woman) that Western culture long ago ceded to male genius and patriarchal perspectives, and that turning to the image in the mirror they take another step towards the elaboration of a sexualised subjected female identity"
Simply, this notes that by simply composing yourself for art and choosing how you look and how you're represented, you're taking some sort of control back from the men that stripped it from us hundreds of years ago due to societal roles. These women are doing exactly that. They're taking back their identity and being who they want to be; and if that's shy, it's fine because nobody is telling them to hide. If they're open and showing every part of their genitalia, fine, that's how they want to be seen and it's not been directed for them.
Jurisic notes that she discovered her gaze is very maternal and protective. I'd say mine is similar. When I look at these, a woman looking at nude women I feel pride, happiness, relief, and most of all admiration. I want to know who these women are and talk to them individually. I want to say thank you for doing this. I want to just tell them they're so admired. The female gaze to me is one of admiration and unity rather than sexual, like the male gaze.
These images all work well together to present a unity of women, yet they also shine on their own. They don't rely on the other images to support them or to make them worth anything, but each one stands strong on its own. A combination of 100 strong, beautiful images create a collage that causes an overwhelming sense of adoration, and even motivation to rise against stereotypes and passivity.
Chapter 4 has a theme of mythology. She combines images from chapter 3 to create the 9 daughters and muses of Mnemosyne, Gaia's daughter.
She chose the images to combine by seeing who would fit the profiles of each muse, and stacked the images on top of each other.
This could be seen as a way to organise and group women, but their movement in the image seems to fight against this categorisation by not staying in one place. The images are combined to look like a charcoal sketching perhaps, or even a daguerreotype from a century ago.
The images are hectic and imperfect yet that's what makes them so effective.
The women blend in some places but are their own people in other places, particularly the faces. What does that say about the women? It's hard to put my finger on it. Perhaps it's simply to explore mythology and women and the personality and types of women. Perhaps it's a message on how women are perceived as only having a few types, but then why would a woman artist do this?
To get a better idea I looked more into what the 9 muses were muses of;
The images are hectic and imperfect yet that's what makes them so effective.
The women blend in some places but are their own people in other places, particularly the faces. What does that say about the women? It's hard to put my finger on it. Perhaps it's simply to explore mythology and women and the personality and types of women. Perhaps it's a message on how women are perceived as only having a few types, but then why would a woman artist do this?
To get a better idea I looked more into what the 9 muses were muses of;
They're all muses of some sort of art, depending on what you consider to be art. Perhaps it suggests women are the muse of all art, which is relevant to the artist as a woman, who looks on at these women in a motherly way, and seeing all of these women as her own muses.
She then combines all of these images to create the mother, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.
Perhaps this creates the memory of women, an embodiment of all muse and subsequently all women, and even possibly Jurisic is Mnemosyne, in her motherly eyes.
In her houses of snakes video : https://vimeo.com/156012872
In the words of '100wordsmag', "the fifth chapter of My Own Unknown, plunges the viewer further into its remixing of female identity as a renewed collective meta-fiction... Here, her identification with her aunt Gordana Čavić is crystallised. They share, in her words, the same taste for adventure and braveness. They also share the awareness of an innocence lost in the depths of a river."
In the words of '100wordsmag', "the fifth chapter of My Own Unknown, plunges the viewer further into its remixing of female identity as a renewed collective meta-fiction... Here, her identification with her aunt Gordana Čavić is crystallised. They share, in her words, the same taste for adventure and braveness. They also share the awareness of an innocence lost in the depths of a river."
The artist used the camera her aunt left behind, a super-8 camera. She aimed to re-enact the parts of her aunts life that were lost.
This is like a continuation from chapter one where she explores who her aunt was.
They're viewed as short films.
I kind of struggled to decipher this in all honestly so I looked online for a more in depth meaning.
This is like a continuation from chapter one where she explores who her aunt was.
They're viewed as short films.
I kind of struggled to decipher this in all honestly so I looked online for a more in depth meaning.
'100wordsmag' has some idea to what this could mean;
"It is hard not to detect parallels between this diorama-like assemblage and Marcel Duchamp’s major artwork Étant Données. An unexpected and unimaginable landscape, visible only through the peepholes, communicates an intense experience of accessing a life shrouded in mystery, but imagined this time by women. In these rolls of film, women emerge as the ‘other’ – that which cannot be grasped, comprehended or penetrated, but only felt and sensed, the same way as war, displacement and tragedy. If male identity by normative modes operates as a solid narrative object (an object that “is what it is”, according to Jean-Paul Sartre’s definition), My Own Unknown resets femininity as a restless imaginative space for to open up thinking on micro-histories of women that were either mythologised or buried in the tomb of history."
This certainly brings more perspective to the work. I decided to look at what the author of this article, Natasha Christia, was referring to in terms of Étant Données.
I can kind of see the link the author is making, the two made up worlds with the focus on femininity.
"In these rolls of film, women emerge as the ‘other’ – that which cannot be grasped, comprehended or penetrated, but only felt and sensed" Is a really key quote to this. Perhaps we're seeing these woman through eyes that are more separated from Jurisic's, she may have tried to look at these women which could be portraying her aunt, through the eyes of those that knew her. Hidden in mystery and half truths (Jurisic filled in the empty parts of the stories of her aunt), the landscape represents this through the history and the identity is hidden to shown only half showing the identity of the girl. The use of slow motion in the videos also add to this mystery while also giving the girl an ethereal, important feeling. There's shots of water which links to the way both the girl used as a mask in chapter 2 and how she died, and also the way her aunt passed and was found in a river.
"In these rolls of film, women emerge as the ‘other’ – that which cannot be grasped, comprehended or penetrated, but only felt and sensed" Is a really key quote to this. Perhaps we're seeing these woman through eyes that are more separated from Jurisic's, she may have tried to look at these women which could be portraying her aunt, through the eyes of those that knew her. Hidden in mystery and half truths (Jurisic filled in the empty parts of the stories of her aunt), the landscape represents this through the history and the identity is hidden to shown only half showing the identity of the girl. The use of slow motion in the videos also add to this mystery while also giving the girl an ethereal, important feeling. There's shots of water which links to the way both the girl used as a mask in chapter 2 and how she died, and also the way her aunt passed and was found in a river.
The videos are slow paced, reflecting back on the eternity of the muses. It seems that everything from the previous chapters has been intertwined for this finale.
https://cphmag.com/conv-jurisic/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/art-in-focus-her-own-unknown-by-dragana-juri%C5%A1ic-1.3406304
http://www.1000wordsmag.com/dragana-jurisic/
Bright, S. (2010) Auto focus; The self-portrait in contemporary photography. London: Thames & Hudson.Mirror mirror; Self-portraits by women artists. London: National Portrait Gallery.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/art-in-focus-her-own-unknown-by-dragana-juri%C5%A1ic-1.3406304
http://www.1000wordsmag.com/dragana-jurisic/
Bright, S. (2010) Auto focus; The self-portrait in contemporary photography. London: Thames & Hudson.Mirror mirror; Self-portraits by women artists. London: National Portrait Gallery.
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