Fotograf Zone – Jan Durina

Jan Durina is a Slovak interdisciplinary artist who utilizes a diversity of medium to develop personas and grow the complex narratives they exist in. Through performance, photography, and sound Durina unfolds the nuance of each narrative, grappling with themes of loneliness, loss, the boundaries between nature and the body, and the distortions of the human mind as experienced within an ever developing gender and identity. Through this process Durina produces art works in the form of music, performance, film, and photography, seamlessly and confidently moving between exhibitionary to performance contexts.

The Cute & Tragic performance photographs were created for the Oskár Čepan Award exhibition and present the artist’s auto-portraits in diverse situations in hand-made costumes. Those are embroidered, made of a number of details, which represent a great many hidden references signifying restlessness of mind, identity crisis and the effect of peer pressure. The performance called Awesome Heat reminds one of a shamanic ritual, which the author entitles “an elegy for dying nature.” The issue of nature and an individual’s personal relationship with it has been the focus of Durina’s attention for the several past years. Previous works on the subject include the Horal series from the years 2016–17 reflecting the environs of his native Liptov but primarily reinventing one's relations with the external conditions of the environment, one's body, and one's self-perception.

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1–4 | Jan Durina, Horal, 2016–2017
5–6 | Jan Durina, Cute & Tragic, 2019

Jan Durina

(1988) is a young Slovak interdisciplinary visual artist who, through a wide range of media, creates a peculiar universe of beings, identities, and narratives that seem to originate from this world only as its distorted mirror echoes. His work is not strictly autobiographical, but questions of personal identity and sexuality, mental health, and the intimate aspects of his own experience are deeply embedded in it. His imagination, shaped by melancholy and the deprivation of someone who rejects a normalized, stereotyped world authentically and painfully, often leads him to explore corporeality and the human figure. And it becomes “quite evident which characters resonate with him and in which he playfully or ironically comments on overflowing testosterone-fueled egos.3” His artistic thinking is informed by critical concepts of queer, feminist, and ecofeminist theories, as well as Autotheory. At the heart of his work lies a common, overarching theme: mental health, human vulnerability, and care for others, alongside collaboration and the dynamics of non-hierarchical relationships. Human fragility has long ceased to be dogmatically suppressed as a weakness—art was among the first disciplines to recognize the need for its rehabilitation. Durina’s photographs, textiles, hand-embroidered and embellished objects, and drawings serve as mental maps of his body’s trajectories—collapsing, temporarily vague, refusing to fulfill expectations placed upon it, resisting through its wounds and fractures, and striving to love itself just as it is. In doing so, it becomes fully human.