This work is a video document of an emotional state. Vesic reads the Psalms – which precedes the process but is not shown – and one can see her emotional reaction, the tears. By slowing down the action, by the dynamism of the recorded image, the outcome is the immobility of the painting – a self-portrait with tears. The tears are essential in Andersen's tale 'The snow queen', where the boy Kay is condemned to cold artificiality because a demonic looking-glass splinter pierced his eye and heart and reflects/obstructs the sending/receiving of feeling, leaving his heart chained in ice. Only the countermagic of flowing tears cleanses the evil splinter out of his eye. The self-nourishing loop of artificiality is broken and Kay's heart feels love again. In the act of observing, the self-portrait could be a visual manifestation of reflection rather than just a simple act of looking. That evasive identity of the mirrored reflection is the basis for the visual identification (the gaze of the observer encounters the look of the represented character). However, the self-portrait presented by Vesic does not reveal the wholeness of the character, it is fragmentary, dematerialized. The body exists only as the conductor of feelings. The emphasis is on the rhetorical gesture: the tears. They are the means to reflect the inner space. Tears are an invitation to affinity. The observer is invited to overcome, just like Kay, the physical, physiological aspect of the painting/image, melt the ice in one's own heart and defrost the emotion of the self. In the contemporary social context where avoidance of deeply experienced pain, vulnerability or ecstacy is commonplace, Vesic's creative act evokes the era before art, where the work of 'art' was only the means by which one entered the beyond, crossed to the other side, aware that the beyond can also be 'the other person'.
– Nenad Radic & Jelena Vesic
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Production: Vladimir Zaric, CyberEX
Vesna Vesic ° 1975, Belgrade (Joegoslavia)
Lives and works in Belgrade (Joegoslavia)
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