Tanja Lažetić: (A)portrait

A sequenced line of one and the same image fastened with large nails. Is it a portrait, a self-portrait, an image, a face? How many images are there in this photograph? How many images does it take to find a likeness that is one’s own? Tanja Lažetić works on her face using the technique of photomontage. She literally dissects, disassembles and composes her own portrait. She sometimes adds, and other times subtracts colour, light, slits, changing sharpness and contrasts, as well as moving, shifting, borrowing parts of her image. Through the process of photograph manipulation, which forms part of the series Brez naslova, samo številke (Untitled, Just Numbers), she searches for the possible ideals of a perfect image. She is exploring to what extent the visually manipulated image is still one’s own portrait, whether it has an identity of its own, its own Self. To what extent it still contains the Ego, and to what extent the Other, a stranger? With the technology available to us, we can rework our own likenesses to the extreme in our desire to achieve today’s beauty ideals and attract attention. We flood social media with (self)portraits, shared "intimately" with friends and the wider world. To what extent do these images even capture an authentic moment and memory, and to what extent are they a construct of narcissistic self-images and franchise ideals? Portraits have become mere backdrops to images, bereft of identities, captured moments that are already disintegrating memories. Drawing on the tradition of feminist avant-gardes, Tanja Lažetić uses and exposes her own image to address relevant and at the same time universal social issues of banality, ordinariness, consumption and transience, as well as the disintegration of (one’s own) immortalised image.

Tanja Lažetič (1967) works in the fields of photography, video, performance, ceramics and artist's book. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at venues that include Moderna galerija Ljubljana (Museum of Modern Art) and MSU Metelkova (Museum of Contemporary Art), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Gagosian Gallery in Paris, Beverly Hills and New York. She is the recipient of several prizes, including the Bronze Award at the Nanjing International Art Festival in China, Third Prize at the Unicum International Ceramics Triennial in Ljubljana and the Rihard Jakopič Award. She has published more than twenty artist's books which form part of museum collections around the world, most notably MoMA New York, Tate London and Bibliotheque Kandinsky Paris.

Meta Kordiš (1978), is an ethnologist, cultural anthropologist and art historian who works as a curator of the NLB Art Collections. She holds a PhD from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is the editor for independent culture for the Dialogi magazine, author and co-author of several exhibitions in the field of modern and contemporary art, as well as curator of the permanent exhibition of the Slovenian Banking Museum (Bankarium).