We present an extract from Her Own, the new photobook by Dragana Jurišić - enjoy a gallery of images above, and read an extract below.
'Her Own documents Jurisic's attempt to trace the story of her aunt Gordana, a glamorous figure who left rural Yugoslavia in the 1950s and whose subsequent experiences involving false identities and espionage remain mysterious. Jurisic presents her careful, fruitful research in a series of illustrated notebooks that recall WG Sebald’s approach to memoir, history and reflection'' (Aidan Dunne, Irish Times).
Rade
Rade was the only one who dared to say what others only alluded to, fuelled by a lot of šljivovica, of course. It didn't matter that it was eight in the morning when he called in. Around here we start early. Since childhood, I’ve been trying to figure out what bird he reminds me of. Could never quite nail it. His nose is like a huge, hooked beak. His eyes are laser blue, the colour of the irises intensified by the pinkness of the whites of his eyes. He got that from the bottle. Rade drank and talked. About her beauty, about what she really did 'down there’. Rade said that Gordana would come back to the village from time to time. The ripples of excitement and whispers this would cause amongst the locals were as if an alien ship had landed. "She was so beautiful," he said, "it was like she was her own creator."
Every time I poured him a shot; he would raise it up to the ray of light entering thought the open door. Amber-like, heavy and gold, it sloshed in the small glass between his fingers. After assessing its spectral qualities, he would jerk the shot back down his throat faster than I could blink "thhhaaaaghhh." Rade beamed. "In what way, beautiful?" I asked. He lifted the empty glass, tracing the memory of her body with it. "She was tall, taller than most men I knew shaped like those partisan monuments. Proud. Strong. And she had breasts and hips and muscles and force. I’ll never forget how she walked; it was militant and seductive at the same time. She wasn’t one of those fragile beauties floating down the road, I can tell you that for sure." – "And her face?" – "Light green eyes, narrow nose, wide lips, very regal. Gordana looked as if she did not belong here amongst us. The young girls from Kućanci started at her in awe; at Gordana’s perfectly tailored clothes, her jewellery and her exquisitely coiffed dark blond hair. Her former school pals watched on with a combination of envy and suspicion, how could they not? By the time they’d hit 40, they were already old women." He paused for a second to scratch that beak of a nose. "Erm… there was a rumour Gordana handpicked the most attractive girls in the area with a promise of finding them seamstress jobs in Paris. Not many returned," Rade said glancing at me sideways. "You should really ask your aunt Milanka, they were inseparable – then something went down, don’t know what…"
After our chat, he took me to see his beloved pigs. As soon as they could smell him, they ran out of the enclosure into the fenced yard, their wet pink snouts waving at us in what seemed to me to be utter happiness. He gave each of them a good scratch. Rade was very proud of his pigs. A few weeks after our conversation, he was found dead next to the pigsty. Rade’s heart exploded after 56 years of hard labour, after countless shots of šljivovica, after numerous graves dug, including the ones for his wall-eyed alcoholic mother and his vegan prophet father who lived up a tree. He was buried a stone’s throw away from Gordana in the local village cemetery. I wonder who dug his grave.
Her Own by Dragana Jurišić will be launched at Photo Museum Ireland on Thursday 22nd December - find out more here.
About The Artist: Dragana Jurišić is an award winning artist with an international reputation. Her project, My Own Unknown, has been exhibited globally, and her photobook and series, YU: The Lost Country has been exhibited at Noorderlicht Photogallery, Groningen (2018); Organ Vida Festival, Zagreb (2017); RHA Gallery, Dublin (2014); and originally at Belfast Exposed (2013). She is in many collections, including National Gallery Ireland, Trinity College, Dublin City Council and the public collection of the Arts Council of Ireland. Find out more about her work here.
