GRZINIC: PERSONAL -- POLITICAL in LJUBLJANA

[anna balint]

   PERSONAL - POLITICAL


   INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY

   LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Cankarjev dom, Photo Gallery


   December 12, 2001 - January 13, 2002

   PARTICIPATING ARTISTS


   Luka Dekleva (Ljubljana)

   Vlasta Delimar (Zagreb)


   Uros Djuric (Belgrade)

   Eclipse (Ljubljana)


   Seiichi Furuya (Graz)

   Zeljko Jerman (Zagreb)


   Tanja Ostojic (Belgrade)

   Marjetica Potrc (Ljubljana)


   Zvonka Simcic (Ljubljana)

   Tone Stojko (Ljubljana)


   Aleksandra Vajd (Ljubljana)

   CURATED BY Marina Grzinic


   The exhibition explores the extremely sensitive border between the
   personal and political, when the body becomes a personal memory, a
   personal gesture and a personal document or political act and a photograph
   loses the mark of innocent and/or subjective truth. Taking personal and
   political within photography, I would like to theorize the medium of
   photography, as both, an outcome and a servant of positivism (objective,
   unmediated and actually imprinted by the light rays) on one side, and as
   an ideal representational mode to bring the personal into political
   discursive constructions, on the other. I will draw a parallel between
   different systems of representation in regard to the personal and the
   categories of absence/presence, attempting in this way to chart the
   process of the institution of the subject within the political. The
   meanings ascribed to the categories of absence/presence, sometimes
   inconsistent, amorphous and epistemologically vague, are constantly in
   flux, repositioned and reoriented and involve larger discourses which
   engender them. The binary terms of presence/absence in relation to the
   representation of the personal within the political (or as a political)
   culminates in two ways simultaneously: through technological interventions
   and discursive practices. What I am proposing here is not to recuperate
   some notion of pure investment of the category of the personal and its
   counterpart - the political, but to outline the discursive-visual terrain
   in which such issues have functioned, both in the past and in the present.
   In both cases, the photographic camera produces representations - iconic
   signs - translating the personal into the political via the categories of
   absence/presence. (M. GRZINIC)