Belgrade



Ivana Jaksic is a Serbian artist from Belgrade who has exhibited in Austria, Switzerland, Romania, New York City, Moscow, and Tel Aviv. Her series “Visas” (2008) reflects on the current political environment in the Balkans and Serbia. Living in this region during the 1990s formed Jaksic’s artistic interests, and her previous work also reflects a time of civil unrest in the Yugoslavian region. Her first exhibition, “The Smile of Marko Kraljevic” (1998), dealt with myths and warriors. Another exhibition, “Clara Schumann” (2002), modified the image profiled on the 100 Deutschmark German currency bill (the basic currency in Serbia) by presenting a modern icon of the society as destroyed by civil war and the hyperinflation of the Yugoslavian national currency.

Jaksic’s work contains multilayered meanings that allow for multiple interpretations. While many post-World War II artists influenced by Existential philosophy aimed at depicting the meaning of their own artistic personalities, much contemporary art expressed a collective identity defined through culture and society. Jaksic’s work is influenced by 1960s–70s’ art philosophies, especially that of French thinkers, Jacques Derrida and Michael Fuco.


While waiting for a visa in front of the Switzerland Embassy in Belgrade, Jaksic had the idea for her most recent project. After waiting in line for hours, she realized it would be easier to create a visa herself; the process of painting it by hand is equivalent to the psychological, emotional, and physical effort required to obtain the necessary documents to leave the country. In “Visas,” Jaksic presented full-color passport visas painted with an oil technique.

By transforming the process of media consumption into an active and critical process, people gain greater awareness of media’s potential for misrepresentation and manipulation of consumers as well as an understanding of the role that the media plays in constructing views of reality.

In Jaksic’s work, the actual identity of each passport holder is hidden. Strikingly absent from her simulated passports is all personal information: names, gender, dates, and the purpose of travel. Only numbers are given visual value, and symbolize the cruelty of political, bureaucratic administrations. In reality individual identity does not exist, only collective identity, and individuals are forced into that collectivity, without concern for singularity or difference.

Documents with pictures, personal IDs, and passports are official confirmation of one’s identity. But in the Serbian context they gain symbolic connotations. Jaksic’s IDs represent the European citizens who are not allowed to travel freely to other parts of the world and who must define their identities in relation to other people, with limited freedom. With authority of a foreign embassy , collective identity is constructed by outside factors—individual groups are not alike in every way, except for membership in an ethnic and national community; discrimination is still present and considered justified Jaksic carefully provides graphical solutions on her art image of visas, where with the painting style and graphical solutions applied on her work, she is illustrating their symbolical meaning, as well as the status of a society in transition between the citizens of Serbia and a foreign diplomacy authority, presenting a socio-political message "visa restrictions for citizens of Serbia."

Harsh administrative rules, when it comes to an international travel, result in people becoming anonymous numbers—a situation that makes life difficult and deeply insulting for citizens. Jaksic uses her artistic sensibility to focus attention on the problem of limited travel for Serbia citizens and political bureaucracy.

Some of her visas were recently exhibited in a Ministry for Refugees building in Switzerland. It was interesting to observe the reactions of the employees directly responsible for deciding the destinies of different immigrants from Serbia. The respond varied from total indifference to total opposite reaction.

Under such circumstances, the graphic and artistic solutions Jaksic explores in her visas have a deeper meaning. Media literacy is the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms. It uses an inquiry-based instructional model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, see, and read. During the last 2 decades Serbia and ex Yugoslavian country have encountered different political dramatic events on a global plan which deterred fast and frightening transformation in entire world. Every day, those political events give visual stimulation and inspiration to an artist. Political events, social themes, science, technology, mass media, popular culture and other motives are giving artists enough material for enough art work with historical context.