Author: Jelena Rakin

Jelena Rakin, Ph. D.

Artist Statement

In my artistic work, I principally explore the images of nature. I frame them into narratives that point out beyond the seeming, self-evident appearance of the surface phenomena in photography and video. I examine the possibility of subliminal presence, undercurrent principles, and tacit knowledge in the images. I am additionally interested in the clash of different regimes of knowledge, histories, or ideologies that appear unrelated or even juxtaposed. In this vein and in the academic context of my postdoctoral project about the aesthetics of the images of the cosmos in film and photography, I study the convergence of scientific and magical thinking. Building upon these interests, in my artistic work I find an even more compelling format to explore associative, somatic, and aesthetic approaches for combining different perspectives within images.

Short Bio

Jelena Rakin studied film and literature in Switzerland (Zurich), the United States (Princeton), Germany (Essen), and Croatia (Osijek). Since 2010, she has taught courses on the aesthetics, theory, and history of film and photography at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, where she is currently a staff member. From 2010 to 2018, she conducted and finished her doctoral dissertation on the colorized films of the silent film era, published in German in 2021 under the title “Film Farbe Fläche: Ästhetik des kolorierten Bildes im Kino 1895–1930” (“Film Color Surface: The Aesthetics of the Painted Image in Cinema, 1895–1930”). Jelena is currently working on her second post-doctoral project on the aesthetics of images of the cosmos.

Short CV / Teaching

Published essays and conference papers

The cycle represents a myse an abyme of negative and positive photography providing a curious synthesis of time and place. The images within images show sculptures of the female shape that repose in the ashen vegetation of a graveyard landscape. Moss covers the inorganic curves of the stone flesh, indicating the eternal metamorphoses of death and rebirth, Eros and Thanatos, past and future, the flows and shifts in which every action has a corresponding reaction, every black its white, each color its contrasting complement, each purple its yellow. The photographs were then placed in nature and photgraphed themselves. The image surface becomes an alchemisitic place that underlines the flux of eternal reversals: of black and white, absence and presence, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. “The Ashen Picture” contrasts two seminal ideas: that photography embalms life and that it turns it to ashes. The series tests the possibilities and limits of the medium to navigate between the visible and the invisible, to both capture the phenomena of the visible material world and suggest the shadowy world of specters. By exploring the notion of photography’s “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin) in this way, the series meditates on the inextricable web of connections where the flesh turns to ashes, then returns as organic matter – a flower, a tree, or the moss that mimics a skin layer on the stone. All these metamorphoses are entangled in the image surface of the world, the next transformation lurks in the moment to follow.

The short film shows cemeteries where sculptures of women in sensual postures act as hosts and subordinates of the teeming plant life. The sculptures exhibit varying states of decay. Many are covered with layers of moss and lichen, giving the stone an organic layer, almost a living skin. The images oscillate between stillness and motion, suggesting not only the suspension between life and death but also the vitalist potential of film as a medium that can “preserve” life.

This peculiar placement of the female shape offers a departure point for reflection on its shifting functions from mythical narratives to contemporary ecofeminism.
A sense of commodification hovers over the use of the female shape in the cemetery sculptures. They draw on the symbolic connection of the woman to nature, love, and the cycle of life, but also on the notion – as Edgar Allan Poe wrote – that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world. There is something slightly jarring about these sculptures and their use of naked, potentially erotic female bodies as a counterpoint to death through the conventional association of the woman with life and nature (an association that traditionally served to exclude women from the domains of intellectual and political life).

But if the stone as a material is intended to withstand time, the plants expose the human claim to a physical presence through symbols as feeble. As if in defiance of the symbolic orders created by humans, the plants assert their silent agency, engulfing everything from stone to earth. They introduce and offer a standpoint beyond the polarity of the sexes inherent in the sculptures, pointing to an agency and forces altogether beyond the anthropocentric volition and narrative. As the anthropocentric viewpoint is abandoned, all the power and symbolism of the human order seem to lose their validity and relevance.
Long camera takes sometimes make it hard to discern whether the image is still or moving, blurring the boundaries between film and photography. Then something in the background moves minimally – or does it? The uncertainty reclaims animism as a possible principle at work: “it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye… a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (Walter Benjamin). Is our mind playing tricks on us? Or has something in the still image come to life? The “optical unconscious” of the medium is also at work here, excavating the cultural unconscious and its bias, which favors a standpoint of anthropocentric agency.

Screened for the audience at the international conference IMAGES OF NATURE (Zurich),
May 8, 2021