• Ljubljana / London
Miha Colner

Marija Mandić & Ana Žeželj: The Diary

Marija Mandić & Ana Žeželj: The Diary

Marija Mandić & Ana Žeželj: The Diary

Marija Mandić & Ana Žeželj: The Diary

The article was originally published in the publication of the exhibition of Marija Mandić and Ana Žeželj: The Diary at Artget Gallery, Kulturni centar Beograda.

Throughout history, human societies have been struggling to understand foundations and properties of a memory, which has time and again proven to be highly ambiguous phenomenon. An individual is often torn between conflicting notions of events that have taken place in public or private sphere; however, people often perceive and comprehend the same things in a completely different way. Furthermore, in the age rapid information flow, there are events and situations that with the aid of mass media, popular culture and public discourses affect wider public, and can eventually constitute a collective memory. Existence of common memories, as well as a possibility to share information and to gossip, is a fundamental bond that holds human societies together; it enables relationships, sense of belonging, and, ultimately, it can form an identity of an individual or a group.

Collective memory gradually makes history, which is why interpretation of current (public) events is of such a enormous importance to any rulers. However, in the world, shaped by technological extensions and deluge of information that nobody can fully absorb, process and comprehend, people are often deterred from proliferation of instant contents, and can adopt escapist tactics. Some learnt to recognise information and situations that actually matter to and affect them, and to dismiss and ignore the ones over which they have no power. Escapism is not necessarily an act of individualist ignorance but can also be an act of civil disobedience, a refusal to acknowledge irrelevant pieces of information.

Marija Mandić, July 32, 2019-2020

The knowledge of current affairs and historical discourses, however, cannot produce the entire picture and complexity of the course of events and memories. There are many ways to write history, and official historiographies are only small fragment in the network of memories. People who were active participants of certain events may have utterly different experience of what later, stylised and simplified, constitutes official history. Nobody can see and perceive historical events, such as war, revolution or mass migration in its entirety. History as it is in the books could not be seen and perceived by anyone who took part in it.

The exhibition The Diary showcases works of two artists, Marija Mandić and Ana Žeželj who both address the phenomenon of creating and perpetuating memories. In their works they focus on their personal experiences and memories that help them explore their own identities. They both use photography to highlight events of their own lives and lives of the people who are/were close to them or to whom they are/were related. Despite addressing personal issues, their works may be perceived as profoundly political since they commonly expose questions of understanding the present and the past. With their visual narratives they highlight their points of view of current state of affairs and historical discourses that are always exceptionally complex but (too) often presented in an entirely simplified way.

Ana Žeželj, Missing Piece, 2023

Marija Mandić merges two quite recent pieces that explore the history of her own family . With photographic and archival investigation in the series White Bee she explores origins of her ancestors. After she found a drawing of a family three in her grandmother’s house, the artist started exploring her roots which brought her to challenge patriarchal traditions, and therefore also national mythologies and political discourses that still prevail in the society. Even though only names of male ancestors are usually marked, the letter also mentions a distant mother – white bee. In the series July 32 she visited places where her grandparents were born, in the area across the territories of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Montenegro, using guidelines based on their memories. By juxtaposing images of places and their grandparents’ memory-guidelines she tends to demythologise the family narrative and to question reliability of memory.

Marija Mandić, White Bee, 2021-

Ana Žeželj has a rather different take on the notion of memory which she explores by taking and manipulating pictures of the world around her. She creates visual diary of her life and life of her immediate surroundings, and thus showcasing selected events and situations that cannot speak for themselves since their context and meaning remain highly ambivalent, without linear narrative. The viewer is thus challenged to decode her images that represent the complexity of various personal memories and experiences. The practice of Ana Žeželj proves that photography is an extremely deceptive medium that cannot determine and explain the wider context. Even though her images, direct and immediate, constitute an archive of selected events and situations, significant only to her, these visual memories, as they often do, remain confusing and uncertain.

Ana Žeželj, Missing Piece, 2023

 

Ana Žeželj, Missing Piece, 2023

Marija Mandić, White Bee, 2021-

 

© Miha Colner, March 2024