JELENA (JELLY) LUISE (DE/RS) & SANJA GROZDANIĆ (AU/BA)
Residency period: September-November 2023
Jelena (Jelly) Luise is an artist and photographer preoccupied by the condition of transit. Their practice explores the complex interplay of images in relation to time and memory, driven by an intrigue into the emotive repercussions of power and conflict. Often depicting radiant and troubled scenes, their work explores states of restlessness, chaos, the unconscious and slips of translation.
Luise’s collaborative and solo work has been shown at Chiasso Biennale, Editorial Projects, Firstdraft Gallery, Badland, Higurashi (ECAL, 2020), and SCREENSAVERS (Walther König, 2022) among others. They currently live and work in Berlin.
Sanja Grozdanić is a writer living in Berlin. Through fiction, essay and performance, her work explores issues of memory, dispossession and deviance, and the slippages between public and private grief, anxiety and imagination. Recently, she co-wrote Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century) with Bassem Saad. The pair performed the work at the Frankfurt Mousonturm, Sunflower Theatre Beirut, and will perform a new edition at Centrale Fies for the LIVE WORKS Summit 2023. Her essays and fiction have been published by The White Review, The Griffith Review, and SSENSE, among others.
During their residency, they will work on their project Lily of the Valley. The project in progress invokes the historical record of strikes across mines in the sunset years of Yugoslavia to make connections with more contemporary environmentally-focussed protests and uprisings, the most pertinent example of which resulted in the revocation of Rio Tinto’s license to build Europe’s largest lithium mine in Serbia’s Jadar Valley.
Rooting their research in specific cases to avoid both universalism and exceptionalism, they are attentive to the history of feminist anti-war groups when questioning how the politics of ecological crisis can avoid nationalist capture.