March 29th at 6 PM
Laufer Art
Svetozara Radića 4, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
Selfie culture? Researching Identity through self-portraiture.
In the 1990s I earned a living as a subject in front of the camera. Years later, I radically shifted this orientation: I became the author of my own representation, gradually creating an extensive body of self-portraits. I have been doing this kind of work ever since, questioning always the position of the subject-woman with respect to the camera lens.
When I first began my work as a photographer, I drew inspiration from the work of Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman among others, and I felt myself in good hands in this rather exclusive club of self-portraiture artists. Who could have imagined that 15 years later, “selfie” would become the word of the year in 2013 and that what seems like everyone in the world would be snapping away with a built-in camera-telephone turned around and aimed at themselves?
How the “self” actually figures in our increasingly “selfie culture” and what we as artists choose to put in our frames? Is there a difference of how do we present ourselves on social media and in art galleries? What does “perfection” mean? I ask about the distinction between art photography and contemporary selfies? In so doing, I evoke the explosive combination of anxiousness and celebration that comes from daring to realise abstract ideas with one’s own body, during the performance of the absolutely singular mixture of numbness and physical pain produced by the photo shoot as an experience of the process of creating art. What, if any, continuum can we draw between the image produced by that intense experience and
the quick image produced by an IPhone X and available filter work?
Susanne Junker
Sponsored by: Smokvica
On 30.3.2019 in UK Stari grad, in collaboration with Cedra Belgrade Susanne Junker will talk about her work with Marija Jovanovic and will present her book XXI Century Woman.
