Dragana Jurišić

Born 23rd May 1975 (Našice, Croatia, former Yugoslavia)
Website draganajurisic.com

Dragana Jurišić is an ex-Yugoslav artist based in Dublin. She works predominantly through the medium of photography, text and installation. Dragana Jurišić has won a significant number of awards including Golden Fleece Special Recognition Award, IMMA 1000 Residency Award and numerous Bursaries and Project Awards. In December 2013, Dragana completed her PhD and finalized a three-year long project ‘YU: The Lost Country’ that culminated in a critically acclaimed touring exhibition and a book. Her work is in many collections including National Gallery of Ireland, Arts Council Collection and Irish State Art Collection. She has exhibited widely both in Ireland and internationally. Her new book Museum, collaboration with Paula Meehan, is to be released in July 2019, published by Dublin City Council.

Publications

Photography books by

2019 Museum, Dragana Jurišić & Paula Meehan, Dublin: Dublin City Council
2015 YU: The Lost Country, Dublin: Oonagh Young Gallery

Awards and honours

2019 Golden Fleece – Special Award
2018 Selected as one of 100 Photographic Heroines by Royal Photographic Society
2018 Awarded Temple Bar Studio three year membership
2017 IMMA 1000 Residency Award
2016 Nominated for Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
2016 Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award
2016 Awarded a residency at Centre Culturel Irlandaise, Summer 2017
2015 YU: The Lost Country book on numerous THE BEST BOOKS OF 2015 LISTS (Photobook Store, Photo-Eye, The Calvert Journal, etc.)
2014 Special Recognition by Dorothea Lange & Paul Taylor Prize [Duke University] for YU: The Lost Country
2014 Emerging Visual Artist Award Ireland, Wexford Arts Centre & The Arts Council’s
2014 Three year residential studio award at Fire station Studios, Dublin, Ireland
2014 Three year membership studio award at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, Ireland
2012 Artist Studio Award 2013, The Royal Hibernian Academy
2012 Selected for Plat(t)forms 2013 at Winterthur Fotomuseum, Switzerland.
2011 Student Graduate Prize, The International Rebecca West Society, New York, USA
2011 The Curtin O’Donoghue Emerging Photographic Artist Award, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland
2009 Shortlisted for the Emerging Visual Artist Award 2009, Wexford Arts Centre, Ireland
2009 MAstars, an annual selection of the most promising artists from the UK’s leading MA courses, UK

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

2018 YU: The Lost Country, Getxo Photography Festival, San Sebastian, Spain
2018 YU: The Lost Country, Nooderlicht Photogallery, Groningen, Holland 
2018 My Own Unknown, Gallery of Photography Ireland, Dublin 
2017 My Own Unknown, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France
2017 YU: The Lost County, Organ Vida, Zagreb, Croatia
2017 My Own Unknown, In Process II series, Rawson Projects Gallery, New York, USA
2016 My Own Unknown, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia
2016 YU: The Lost Country, Westport Town Hall, Westport Arts Festival
2016 My Own Unknown, Spot Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia
2016 My Own Unknown, Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2016 YU: The Lost County, Agusti Centelles Library, part of DOCfield 2016 festival, Barcelona, Spain
2016 YU: The Lost County, Meeting Point Cinema, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
2016 My Own Unknown, Wexford Arts Centre, Ireland
2016 YU: The Lost County, Illuminations Exhibitions, Maynooth University, Ireland
2015 YU: The Lost Country, Feld+Haus Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany
2015 100 Muses, ArtBox, Dublin, Ireland
2014 YU: The Lost Country, The Royal Hibernian Academy, Ireland
2014 YU: The Lost Country, NOHO, Hamburg, Germany
2013 YU: The Lost Country, Belfast Exposed, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
2011 Seeing Things, Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, Ireland
2009 Seeing Things, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales, UK

Group exhibitions

2019 Process 1000/1, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
2018 Naked Truth: The Nude in Irish Art, Crawford Gallery, Cork, Ireland
2018 Raframing the Border, Gallery of Photography Ireland
2018 ‘But still, like dust, I’ll rise’ (after Maya Angelou), Galway Arts Centre
2018 An Act of Hospitality Can Only be Poetic, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland
2017 YU: The Lost Country, a part of Outposts exhibition in The Glucksman, Cork, Ireland
2017 Inspiration and Rivalry: After Vermeer, National Gallery Ireland
2016 In Residence II, exhibition featuring works of Picasso, Warhol, Arbus, etc., London, UK
2016 The Museum of August Destiny, Lismore Castle, Ireland
2016 Royal Hibernian Academy’s 186th Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland
2015 Royal Hibernian Academy’s 185th Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland
2015 Once Upon a Picture, The Ark, Dublin, Ireland
2014 Periodical Review #4, Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland
2014 Royal Hibernian Academy’s 184th Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland
2013 Fading Lights Are Fading, Flood, Dublin, Ireland
2013 New Irish Works, National Photographic Archive, PhotoIreland Festival 2013, Ireland
2012 40 Under 40: Selected works from the Irish State Art Collection, traveling exhibition
2012 Newport Alumni Exhibition, Newport, Wales, UK
2012 Elements: A joint exhibition of Public Sector Art Works, travelling
2011 Human/Nature Landscape Photography from the State Art Collection, Farmleigh Gallery
2011 Emergentes DST 2011, ENCONTROS DA IMAGEM, Monastery of Tibães, Portugal
2011 Royal Hibernian Academy’s 181th Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland
2011 Disruptive Stillness, Jean Paul Slusser Gallery, University of Michigan
2010 Collective Contemporary Art (CCA), Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, Ireland
2008 (Not) a Photograph, Mestna galerija, Piran, Slovenia
2008 178th Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

Projects

Museum (2019)
Museum is a collaborative work with Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s most esteemed poets and myself. In 2018 we were invited by Dublin City Council to respond to 14 Henrietta Street, a remarkable house that in 18^thcentury started its life as a home to one aristocratic family, which by 1911 housed more than 100 people as a tenement building. The DNA footprint of the people who lived in the house is impressed into the floors, stored between the floorboards, carved onto those walls. It’s the walls that fascinated me the most. They were like secret maps inviting you to imagine hundreds of destinies No 14 Henrietta Street witnessed.

My Own Unknown (2018)
My Own Unknown, the latest body of work by Dublin-based photographer Dragana Jurišić, an on-going series comprising five fascinating chapters due to culminate into a fictionalised biography. Combining text and photography, appropriated imagery also intermingles ruthlessly with notebook texts, video and performance, across diverse creative processes and narrated through differing voices. Hybrid and complex, My Own Unknown defies classification – its overlapping of languages, registers and motifs reflect the eclectic and expansive aesthetic and intellectual world of its author, Dragana Jurišić.” (Natasha Christia for 1000 Words Magazine)¹

YU: The Lost Country (2015)
Between the silences which seem to envelope the older generation and the ennui of the young, Jurisic’s YU is the landscape of still and mournful places, in which the weight of the past forces itself upon everything. Rebecca West valiantly fought to believe in the future of Yugoslavia. Dragana Jurisic traces the effects and aftershocks of its disintegration in the subtlety of her colours, her capacity for intimacy and the intelligence and empathy with which she sees what was once Yugoslavia. Jurisic’s YU is still a place which, in West’s words, can induce a ‘bad, headachy dream’. (Colin Graham for SOURCE Photographic Review, July 2013) ²

Seeing Things (2008)
Seeing Things questions the nature of photographic seeing. Are photographers standing back and taking the wider view which separates them both physically and psychologically from their subjects ‘like the gods gazing down on the earth with Olympian dispassion’; or are they hiding with their presented vision, the hurt that they experience in the process? Does this predicament to get taken by the visual beauty of the scene in front of them – even a very upsetting one – override what is essential to one’s mental health – the optimism of memory? Are photographers tricked by beauty?³