mavena NMG@PRAKTIKA_Adela Jušić: Real but not true

OPENING: Thursday, October 14th 2021, 8pm
Klub Kocka Gallery, Dom mladih Split, Ulica slobode 28

The exhibit is open until Friday, October 22th.
Viewings can be arranged by contacting the following number: +385989602701.

Adela Jušić has been researching the legacy of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia for many years, and in 2016 we had the opportunity to present her didactic collage on the outer glass of the Youth Center, entitled “Here come the women”. Adela is focusing on a short historical period when women were active members of socio-political events, during and immediately after the Second World War. Namely, after the war, the political leadership believed that the establishment of legal equality between men and women solved the “women’s issue”. By order of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front abolished itself at its last Congress in 1953, under the pretext that equality between men and women had been achieved and that the revolutionary organization (WAF) no longer had a reason to act in this post-revolutionary period. In the 1950s, women were called upon to take on the more “natural” roles of mother, housewife, educator and caregiver, in addition to the role of udarnica-radnica (strike worker). This caused the process of general emancipation of society to stop on the threshold of women’s emancipation. This irreversibly, at least in Yugoslavia, transformed women from active revolutionary subjects into passive subjects deprived of political power, consumers of mostly patriarchal content.

The exhibition and project Real but Not True were created in 2017 and were then presented in Ljubljana and Sarajevo, and now we are presenting it in a slightly modified form in Split. The extensive project covers works in various media, dealing with a relatively short period of time from the beginning of World War II to the mid-1950s, in which there was a drastic change in politics when it comes to women. The exhibition in Split will present several recent works that Jušić has been actively working on in the last decade. She is constantly expanding her research with new works, while working on the WAF Online Archive, together with colleagues from CRVENA – Association for Culture and Art from Sarajevo.

Works included:

– If needed, we are all soldiers, series of artist interventions on the photo-monograph Sutjeska 1943-73;
– Unknown Partisan Woman, photo/video documentation of sculpture-action in Sarajevo’s public space
– Heroism of labor, a big poster named after a motto for women’s physical labors meant for the revitalization of the post-war Yugoslavia;
– Skirt: red / Skirt: white – based on a story about Ravijojla Janković and Marija Bursać from the book “Žene heroji”/”Women heroes” (1967), which glorifies the antifascist struggle and women’s roles during the struggle. Places in a glass box, the work is placed in a museum context, warning us about the lack of such testimonies within historical institutions;
– The Siege, digital drawing printed on silk, based on a true map of the Sutjeska siege (WW2);
– The Will to Power, two photographs, one of them showing a WAF meeting in Hrastovac, Banija, and the other shows the first government of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia.

For years, Adela Jušić has been exploring the participation of women in the National Liberation War and the related politics of remembrance. She is especially interested in the key period after the Second World War in which women, after fighting side by side with men, rebuilt their destroyed homeland. Then, they were manipulatively “placed” back to their homes, houses, kitchens and bedrooms. Jušić believes that the emancipation process of women in the former Yugoslavia has been greatly reduced, even stopped for a while, and her artistic and activist work is focusing on the means to (re)create policies of memory, related to the role of women in that time.

– Natasha Kadin

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Adela Jušić was born in 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Sarajevo in 2007, and holds MA in Democracy and Human Rights in South East Europe from Sarajevo and Bologna Universities, since 2013.
She founded and coordinated the Association for Culture and Art CRVENA, being involved in cultural projects until 2019. She is one of the two creators of an online archive of the Antifascist struggle of women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia (www.afzarhiv.org).
Jušić has exhibited in many international exhibitions: Frestas – Art Triennial, Sorocaba, Sao Paolo, Manifesta 8; Murcia, Videonale Kunstmuseum Bonn; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich; I will never talk about the war again, Färgfabriken, Stockholm, Balkan Insight, Pompidou Centar, Paris etc. She participated in numerous artist-in-residence programs (ISCP, New York, Kulturkontakt Vienna etc.) and she won the YVAA in 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price CEE in 2011, and the Special award of October Salon in 2013.
Her work often emerges from personal experience and memories, and its goal is being feminist and political. Adela Jušić uses video/video performance, narration and her voice ad her main elements of expression. She also makes installations, feminist didactic works in public spaces which are mainly comprised of texts.

http://adelajusic.wordpress.com

IMPRESSUM:

CURATOR: Natasha Kadin

NMG CURATORIAL TEAM: Katarina Duplančić, Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov

DESIGN: Nikola Križanac

TRANSLATION, DOCUMENTATION: Katarina Duplančić

SETUP: Luce Bračika, Franko Sardelić Kolinac

DONORS: Ministarstvo kulture i medija RH, Grad Split

MAVENA SUPPORTED BY: Nacionalna zaklada za razvoj civilnog društva, Zaklada Kultura nova

SPECIAL THANKS: KUM, MKC, PDM

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