Mira, Study for a Portrait / Jelena Juresa

Throughout her work Jelena Јureša is demonstrating strong interest and alliance with art historical, social and theoretical issues resulting in a strong body of work focusing on the essence of  the lens based medium. In her artistic work often encompasses issues of personal and social histories producing strong fictional vision which leaves no one indifferent. In the multimedia project entitled Mira, Study for a Portrait, she examines the possibility of multilayer photographic and micro narratives and construction of postmemory of a Balkan family. However, that project, no matter how focused on one person's life, brings innovative solutions which can be interpreted as representations of private memories and artifacts.

Like a family album with its linen-embossed cover and single inset snapshot, the book Mira, Study for a Portrait is a meticulous artistic re-creation of one woman, one family, one country. Jelena Jureša traces Mira’s life and the story of the Perera family, a family of Sephardi Jews, during their life in prewar Bijeljina, Bosnia. The intimate journey is re-created by Jureša using found photographs while photographing and filming the places depicted in the narrative. Beginning with Mira’s birth and childhood, her life first in Belgrade, later in Sarajevo, the birth of her children, her marriage, divorce, and work in an old people’s home, ending with her tragic death in 1990 when the riots broke out heralding the beginning of war in Croatia and the fragmentation of former Yugoslavia. This project not only tells the story of a woman’s journey through life but the parallel story of a nation that would fall into a brutal civil war, in many ways mimicking the tragedy of Mira’s life.

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