On 12 March, as a part of 29th International Festival ”Sarajevo Winter 2013”, an exhibition by Jelena Jureša ”MIRA: Study for a Portrait” will be opened in ”IPC” Gallery in Sarajevo.
MIRA, Study for a Portrait is a video installation, set of photographs and 12 lithographs. The video installation is a one-channel projection tracing the life of Mira and her family from the period before her birth until her tragic death.
Through a combination of archive photographs and video recordings, the first part of the work revives the family history of Mira’s parents, David and Minka, David’s Jewish and Minka’s Muslim origins, pre-World War II Bosnia, the travails of David’s family (his parents, siblings and their husbands, wives and children were most brutally murdered in World War II), Minka’s and David’s joining the Partisan’s, their acquaintance, Minka’s nearly fatal wounding and their years together until Mira’s birth.
In the reconstruction of Mira’s portrait, only a few archive photographs were used (it is impossible to make out her image in them, even though they are close-ups). The “true” side of her portrait is reconstructed through the narrative, while the “fake” video and photographs relate her life: the most important moments of her life, the birth of her children, marriage, divorce, her work in an old people’s home, up to her tragic death in 1990, when she died in a car accident near Pakrac, where riots soon broke out heralding the beginning of war in Croatia and the fragmentation of former Yugoslavia.
MIRA is a work on absence which uses the form of the portrait to explore the fragility of memory as well as the relationship between the photographic medium and perception.
The exhibition will be opened at 5 p.m.
