Biography

Since receiving a distinction for her MFA (University of Wales, Newport) in 2008, Dragana Jurisic was selected as an Axis MAstar in 2009 (the most promising MA students in the UK).

In 2010, she received the Arts Council of Ireland Travel and Training Award.

In 2011, the artist won the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Emerging Photographic Artist Award, Arts Council Ireland Travel and Training Award and Culture Ireland funding, as well as the Graduate Student Prize from The International Rebecca West Society.

In 2012, Dragana received funding from Belfast Exposed and the Arts Council Ireland award.

In 2013, Jurisic won a major Bursary Award and completed her PhD research at the European Centre for Photographic Research. She has exhibited widely internationally and her work is part of the Irish State Art Collection, University of Michigan collection and many private collections.

Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. With the disappearance of the country, at least one million five hundred thousand Yugoslavs vanished, like the citizens of Atlantis, into the realm of imaginary places and people. Today, in the countries that came into being after Yugoslavia’s disintegration, there is a total denial of the Yugoslav identity. Dragana Jurisic’s practice looks at the effects of exile and displacement on memory and identity, and it's produced from the position of an exile.

This series of photographs are the outcome of Jurisic’s journey around the former Yugoslavia, retracing Anglo-Irish writer Rebecca West’s route as outlined in her masterpiece ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ (1941), the book that was highly influential in Yugoslav history.

YU: The Lost Country was originally conceived as a recreation of a homeland that was lost, a journey in which Dragana would somehow draw a magical circle (she was following Roland Barthes’s assertion that photography is more akin to magic than to art) around the country that was once hers and resurrect it. Instead, it was a journey of rejection, of displacement and exile that was stronger back ‘home’ than in the foreign place where she chose to live.