The activities of the association f.act derive from the superposition of artistic and research activities by Erika Petric (Graz, A) and Jelena Juresa (Gent, B), with the intention of gender focused discourse in the fields of art, architecture, history and multimedia. Of particular interest are ‘the untold’ histories of female artists, primarily in photography.
Erika Petric was born and raised in Karlovac (Croatia) and graduated architecture from the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). After her graduation she moved to Vienna, where she acquired considerable body of experience in architecture and town-planning working as an architect and project manager. In 2008 she moved to Graz to engage herself in teaching and research and to study photography.
She was Assistant Professor and is now Lecturer at the Graz University of Technology (Institute of Architecture Technology). At TU Graz she lectured and gave courses that aimed to combine theory, design and technology, with special emphasis on theoretical distinction between technique and technology in the context of architectural design and the role of photography in it.
Currently, she is a PhD-candidate at TU Graz with the Thesis on the phenomenology of photography as a medium for representing architectural space experiences (Presence through Absence – from the Photography of Architecture to Architectural Photography).The main target of the work is a phenomenological definition of architectural photography and discussion of its position within architecture technology. Her particular interest addresses female-specific strategies in the use of technology of photography.
In cooperation with Professor Karin Maria Schmidlechner from the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Graz she is preparing a research project on gender-specific readings of the Graz Photography Scene 1950-1980, exemplified on the case study of photographer Elisabeth Kraus.
She has been exhibiting, lecturing and writing on architecture and photography internationally. She lives and works in Graz.
Website: http://erikapetric.com/
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Jelena Juresa (born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) is a visual artist working primarily with photography and video. Her visual research is mainly on identity, politics of memory and oblivion and representational limits of photographic image: the focus of her work is the portrait through which she explores the relationship between the observer and the observed via the given possibility of understanding the portrayed subject and the problematised issue of what the “image” does or does not convey. The photographic image is the starting point of her creative consideration of the portrait, irrespective of the medium – photography, video or an audio-visual installation.
She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Serbia, Austria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Greece, Italy, France and the United States. During her artistic residential stays in Paris in 2004 and 2005, she created the works from the Tourists series. In her latest works, in which she addresses the issue of gender, that is, cultural identity, the narrative is in the foreground and is united with the image in the form of a textual or auditorial narration or music (What it feels like for a girl, 2005 – 2009; Mozarts, 2009; Notes on PMS, 2012; Mira: Study for a Portrait, 2012; STILL, 2013).
Currently she is a PhD researcher at Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media) and KASK Conservatorium. In her research she is focusing on three traumatic pasts of the twentieth century in the European context: the negation of war crimes after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in Republic of Srpska and Serbia, the construction of a national identity in Austria after the Anschluss and its relation to a silence on the Holocaust, and the construction of a Belgian identity in the aftermath of its colonial past.
She lives and works in Novi Sad and Ghent
Website: jelenajuresa.com
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