Jelena Remetin / Kotači sreće

The Wheels of Fortune

The Wheel of Time

BodyCombat

No one can bring back time, but its flow irreversibly changes every level of our existence. Material, physical traces are probably the only ones that, alongside mental projections of memories of past moments (linearly placed for the sake of this argumentation), bring us back to being aware of the time ‘that happened’ and its consequences. But, what is ‘actually’ our time and how did it happen?

Removed from historical flows of events and their normative discourses, and pressed by mediatised images and virtual facts, we ask ourselves where our points of (co)existence ‘through time’ are reflected. What is the most accurate way of displaying them visually?

Such questions are frequently condensed by visual art, especially through the medium of photography; the one in the representation of the real that reflects time multi-dimensionally, and remains the same in its essence and differences, with each look and change of context.

One of such multi-layered deflections through time is embodied in the Jelena Remetin’s photography cycle, suggestively entitled The Wheel of Time. These photographs channel the author’s passion towards painting and her relationship towards the expression of ‘the lived’. They came into existence as a re-appropriation of existing digital negatives filmed by Remetin on her many journeys worldwide. Focus remains on specific moments and intimate melancholic scenes that psychologically reflect time strata and specific moment of looking at them. In preparation of the cycle, Remetin intervened into each of the negatives with acrylic, creating a dense layer of emotions and stimuli, which were emanated by a specific situation via transfer of her own personal moods and reflexive receptions. Afterwards, she developed those time collages within two formats, synthesising through them combinations of her own movements. Moving away from the process of mapping, we advance to the fetishisation of the moment, happening in the meeting of melancholised island, incredibly surreal saurus, sensual waterfall and wise, ancient tree. Every image is a forest of details and survived forms. Thus, the displayed photographs gain patina similar to that found on old postcards in ancient chests that surpass the author’s time.

When we speak about time, we speak about memory, and often evoke various strategies to prevent loss of memory and a liberating release that slightly helps us in lifting the pressure from crossing through time coordinates. We faced each other and discarded the masks of personal truth and vowed to be more transparent in the future. Body Combat, a short-length film introduced in 2015, is a confessional form mediated through narration of a girl that faces us with the traumas she experienced while growing up. Incestuousness and lack of communication. Through mastering one of the widespread forms of physical exercise, she confronts feelings that were set aside or hidden within a personal sea of subconsciousness. Evocative directing, moving away from the linear in the form of recollection characteristic for a film, and using symbolic moments coloured with psychoanalytic references (ice cream melting on the road, room under water, colourful picnic of interesting faces in the story’s prologue and epilogue) have part in building a sequence comprising throughput of a moment and an individual’s catharsis. Everything improves, helped by the author’s optimistic tone and the wheel of fortune tells us that everything is temporary, and so are the personal difficulties, if we manage to deal with them courageously.

The Wheels of Fortune exhibition comprises two artworks by Jelena Remetin, created during 2014.

 Ivana Meštrov