Jelena Juresa is a visual artist.
She holds a PhD in practice from Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, and KASK & Conservatorium. In 2017, she was granted a two-year artistic research project at KASK School of Arts for Unfolding Amnesia: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Artistic Practices and the Politics of Oblivion, and in 2020 a post-doc position at KASK School of Arts for her project entitled Revolt! On a Refusal to Sing—Thinking Resistance Through Music, Waste and Complicity.
Juresa has been extensively working with the questions of national identity, politics of memory, and oblivion through the media of photography, video and text. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including her latest solo exhibitions at Argos centre for audiovisual arts in Brussels, KM-Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien in Graz, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. As a Jackman Goldwasser resident artist in 2015, 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 of the Austrian imperial period, as well as the politics of oblivion after WWII in Austria.
Her latest film project Aphasia, which detects a thread of positions of power, racism, injustice, and violence from Belgian colonialism, Austrian anti-Semitism and the atrocities in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian wars, was produced by Argos centre for audiovisual arts in Brussels, where it was exhibited in a solo exhibition in 2019. The film premiered at Cinematek, Brussels as part of Figures of Dissent: Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema, and has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, at Fotomuseum in Antwerpen, at De Cinema in Antwerp, and at the 23rd Ji.hlava IDFF where it won the main award. Aphasia was shown within the programme of Contour Biennale in Mechelen, where her new work commissioned for the biennale, the film installation Ubundu, was exhibited for the first time (October 2019).
