photo-book – YU: The Lost Country

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art, Dragana Jurisic, Dragana Jurisic YU: The Lost Country, photo-book, photography, photos, YU: 'The Lost Country'

Photographs, like memories, are fleeting; they capture a moment in time and frame it forever. And like memories, photographs invite us to imagine, dream and conjure up stories to help form our identities.

The photo book YU: The Lost Country is Dragana Jurisic’s visual account of her search for her own identity. Born a Yugoslav she sees herself as an exile, a wanderer who has no roots since the destruction of the utopia that was Yugoslavia in 1991.

To help her find a path through a country that no longer exists Dragana Jurisic sought the guidance of the British writer Rebecca West. Published in 1941, West’s masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon weaves three separate trips through the Balkans into one complete memory of what the Yugoslav identity was about.

Following in West’s footsteps, Dragana Jurisic captures glimpses of these memories through her lens and recreates a fictional version of a modern day Atlantis. The muted palate of colours and hazy, sometimes a little out of focus, contours add to the sensation of memories once forgotten, now remembered, a dreamlike world just beyond our reach.

Punctuating these images with words, a combination of her own and West’s, Dragana Jurisic allows the viewer to enter into the images and gain an insight into a lost world. And while memories may be subjective, just as the creation of photographs is subjective to the viewfinder of the photographer, the memories become real, an objective representation of something nearly forgotten.

YU: The Lost Country challenges the idea of what defines identity and encourages the reader to rethink what they believe to be true, but it does this in a very delicate, subtle way. This understated approach is also reflected in the sophisticated exterior of the book, its canvas cover is pleasant to the touch, and the elegant design invites the eye to linger and revisit. A small issue is the closeness of the print to the edge of the pages; one or two millimetres would have saved the illusion of toppling off the edge.

Not only is YU: The Lost Country an unusual photo book, as it gives more than just imagery and frames the stunning photographs with words, memories and history, it also resembles a time-capsule that stores lost knowledge for generations to come.

YU:The Lost Country

YU:The Lost Country

 

a beautiful gift

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art, Dragana Jurisic, generous gift, home, Macedonia, photo of a woman diving, photography, photos, quote, RHA, Royal Hibernian Academy, Skopje, YU: 'The Lost Country'

I have several very talented friends, but one in particular: Dragana Jurisic. She is a beautiful photographer and I love both her company and her work.

Yesterday she gave me an incredible and generous gift, a ‘thank you’ for the help I’d given her in the past. I still can’t quite believe that I may now call this work of art my own and I spent some time hanging it. It now thrones on a wall in my living room, somewhere that I will see and enjoy it everyday.

Dragana took ‘my’ photo in Skopje, Macedonia and it shows a bronze statue of a woman diving into a river (I think it may be the Vadar) below a stone bridge, and if you look closely you can even see some bronze legs sticking out of the water.

The photo was taken as part of her Doctorate and solo exhibition: YU: ‘The Lost Country’ in Belfast last year. This week the exhibition is coming to Dublin, to the RHA (Royal Hibernian Academy), and I am really looking forward to going to the opening on Thursday night.

But until then I will enjoy just looking at my very own ‘Jurisic’ and I know it will give me great pleasure for years to come.

Skopje, Macedonia. Main square littered with ridiculous ‘wizardof Oz’-like sculptures. Disney art vs. infrastructure. It’s very clear which has taken precedence. A nation in crisis. Flags everywhere. ‘We are Macedonians, whatever that means.’

Dragana Jurisic (from her writings)