Description

Exhibition of Contemporary Art "Some Call Us Balkans"
Artwork: To my friends (…), Installation
Artist: Jelena (Jelly) Luise
The installation 'To my friends...' is an open-ended, shifting body of works, displayed as a framed Hahnemühle print behind museum glass sitting across an oil on canvas. Dealing with sentiments like nationalism, kitsch, and the western gaze onto the Balkans, the works don't seek to disentangle, but are rather open to complicating matters, inspired by the framework of the psychoanalytic practice of free association.
The work argues that redemptive conclusions are counter-productive when thinking about repeated fragmentation, and instead offers a more fluid, disrupted trajectory, as it appears in this dream, a non-linear description and (dis)integration of the Balkanic identity, or feeling.