Jelena Radic - Artist

Jelena Radic’s work spans a variety of media, and each medium is very carefully chosen and specific to the issues in the piece: whether it’s the conjunction of a needlepoint tapestry and a pornographic image, or the painstakingly executed painting of a tampon box image. Most evidently, Jelena’s work deals with girls and women, and their representation, in private and in public. Her brand of feminist inquiry is a gentle and empathetic one; her strategy is one of questioning and investigation rather than reprimand.

Everything Shines Here, video, 3’30”, 2003

“A girl performs a choreography of her own devising, watching herself on the camera display, performing a choreography of her own… From the outfit for rhythmic gymnastics training to the gestural stylistics of the body, she embodies the gender which is being exercised. The choice of the situation gives the feminine movements the context of sport and theatre, and articulates gender as exercise and stage. The choreography is also in the skill which the girl is demonstrating and in the morphological ideal of the female gender which forms the body. The occasional clumsiness or exaggeration of the infantile body in theatrical female movements create a comical distance from the ideal. Against this is the is the girl’s exhilaration at the sight of her own body on the screen on which she models herself in executing the female body. The web of relations between the girl, the choreography and the screen constitutes the plot of this work.

“Everything Shines Here invokes various theatrical concepts, but the concept of the home video is too unpretentious for theoretical language. The work supports a feminist interpretation, but from a more sinister point of view, one can also imagine it as a show on a paedophile website. It deals with the coercion of gender adoption, but the girl in it is not a guinea pig. This work resists ethnographic conceit:

-What will you be when you grow up?
-A queen, an actress and a singer.”