Jelena Kršić

Early period

Jelena Krsic was born on the 20th of May in 1968, in Maribor, Yugoslavia.

At the age of seven, with her parents and brother, she moves to Belgrade. There she finishes elementary school, then high school for Film and Theater production. In 1988 she begins her studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in the sculpture class of Professor Nikola Koka Jankovic, a regular member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, whose tutor was the painter Sreten Stojanovic, the student in the school of Roden’s pupil, Antoine Burdell, in Paris. During her studies she was going in for analog photography and scuba diving.

In 1993 she graduates from The Faculty of Fine Arts with the title of MA. At that time, the federal state of Yugoslavia, in which she was born and living, disintegrates. She becomes a citizen of two newly formed countries -Serbia and Slovenia. The anxious and hermetic atmosphere in Belgrade directs the young artist to the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, the only cultural center (of the few) where an artist was able to research, experiment, and show what he has observed. In collaboration with the curator Biljana Tomic. Jelena realizes the performance Virus Part I in March, and Virus Part II in April of 2017. In the Virus performance, in cooperation with another artist, Djordje Aralica, Jelena manipulates information, announcing that the Virus is in the Gallery, and distributes protective masks as precaution. The spectators watch the isolated cell of Virus under the microscope, while at the same time they themselves are watched and recorded by the artist.

In the second part of Virus, the audience receives therapy, based on diagnosis.

The information that the Virus is located in the Gallery is not true, but by examining the audience and observing them, conclusion is made that the audience believe the information and act in accordance with the instructions. Just like the population in the decaying country was behaving.

In 1998, the new performance Ring, already completed, has been removed from the SCC program with no explanation.

In 1999, Belgrade and Serbia are bombarded, and Jelena, who gave birth to her first daughter in 1995, is expecting her second child, also a daughter, during the bombing.

Until 2007, Jelena does not participate in the contemporary art scene. As a sign of protest against the time and place she lives in, filled with manipulation, corrupted morality, she creates in her studio and raises her daughters.

In 2007, she meets artist Nikola Zigon and starts a new life with him.

Creativity- Emotions

2007 is a groundbreaking year when she decides to exhibit her works, originating from the period of 2000 to 2007, for the first time. The exhibition is entitled On Certain Solitude.

Emotions, i.e. sentiments as a complex emotional relationship that includes attitudes and values, are the object of her preoccupation in the process of creation. She exhibits sculptures cast in bronze, such as Mirror, I will stop dreaming of myself, Procession, Love.

In cooperation with Strategy Art she exhibits in the modern Gallery of Budva, and then in many cities of Serbia and Montenegro. Curator Marta Vukotic Lazar says “…  emotionally so strong figures, whose goal is to express the obviousness of our states of the soul. Everything around them exudes an atmosphere arising from changeable relationships.” Her interests reach into fields of psychology, sociology, questions about how much emotions can be controlled, whether there are some which are instinctive, given by birth, how they shape mental states and character, and finally how they affect physiology and physical appearance of an individual.

In 2007 she participates at the Biennial of Enlarged Media “Octopus” at the Pavilion Cvijeta Zuzoric in Belgrade. She exhibits the sculpture Love with the transformer of Nikola Tesla, which she has been allowed to borrow for that occasion, thanks to the kindness of the Nikola Tesla Museum team. For the first time she introduces an additional element into her work and connects the idea of energy field and its emission, in this case, of emotion.

Until 2013, she remains in this field of interest, creating and exhibiting in Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia. She participates in group exhibitions by invitation, and her works have been included in private collections not only of Serbia but of Europe and America, as well as in some museums. Jelena continues to explore emotions, but returns to information and its significance in human life. This process results in the exhibition Voices, which she displays for the first time in the Gallery 212 in Belgrade. The artist emphasizes the power of information in transforming the mental states of individuals and collectives.

She starts introducing drawings on canvas, with free use of color. Expressive, powerful strokes correspond to the potential power of information and the importance we attach to it.

In this opus, a small collection of works, bronze sculptures called “History of private life, can be singled out as particularly interesting. Here the artist contemplates time and memory. Also, she meditates on how much emotions are responsible for the existence of images of the past and whether and how much these images resonate with the present and determine it.

Creativity- communication

In 2014, she makes an exhibition A Social Network or Random Sample of Anonymous Persons, which she displays at the ULUS Gallery, (Gallery of Serbian Artists Association) in Belgrade.

Jelena’s new theme is communication; which is logically derived from the field of emotions she has been dealing with.

Jelena perceives three major areas of communication, to which she gives names, but she translates these names to synonyms and gets other names in which new information is hidden. It opens the energy field of words and meanings that an individual perceives, introducing the symbolism of the objects it uses. The space is divided into three parts, which correspond to the division of communications.

  1. The Cosmic Order, or the Order of Alignment, the order of information that we receive from the direct ancestors, whose series by mathematical progression reaches the infinite. Each individual gets two types of information, cognitive and genome-based.
  2. Social Network or An informal Model of Unknown Circumstances

She sets up 21 heads in terracotta on a table tennis table. The table constitutes a field in which an individual communicates emotionally and mentally.

  1. A Virtual Network or Possible Machinery

Mirrors are placed on boxes that symbolically represent the paradigm.

Boxes with mirrors are placed in the wide space so that the observer can move between them and read, see the scenes. There is communication between mirrors that offer unexpected sights to an observer within the gallery space that he has observed.

Following this exhibition, Jelena receives an invitation from the European Cultural Center and the GAA Foundation, to exhibit at the Biennale in Venice in 2017, the sculpture I am Waiting For It To Happen, at the Time Space Exist exhibition.

Creativity – time, spase

During 2017, she is preparing a project with the team of Nikola Zigon and Nenad Milosavljevic, called Things That Might Have Been (Borhes), for the presentation of Serbia at the Biennale in Venice in that same year of 2017.

Her contemplations on time, and the present moment, and to what extent it is determined by human consciousness and his nature, based on her previous research, have contributed, through discussions, to the artists’ decision to take part in the joint project.

Such reflections lead to the next stage in which she creates the Fine Tuning sculpture, pondering on the fine tuning of vibrations in one character.

Fine tuning has also happened in the artist’s private life, so Jelena and Nikola decide to move to Munich, and there they continue their work and research.

Moving into new circumstances has contributed to their more intense perception of the present, since they have no images of the past, they do not have old information colored by emotions.

Jelena makes notes on new information in 2018, feeling again the significance of a word, and how it can be perceived when it is just being learnt, in this case in relation to the German language. She calls her notes Letters from Munich.  Then she started to work on new project, Superposition of All Possibilities,

The topic of the research is the issue of awareness and information. Jelena researched the thoughts and theories of many philosophers and thinkers, but also physicists and scientists. Experiments and evidence have been conducted in the microworld, photon particles, and hypothesize that the same effect exists in our macroworld. This hypothesis opens a completely new perception of reality, the power of the individual and the collective in acting on matter and energy, in relation to his consciousness.

Jelena’s reflections on such an understanding of the world in which different laws apply, the laws of awareness of the power of intention in anticipation of results, the role of light, frequency, vibration, I translated into visual language.

Consciousness observes all possibilities, she presented it as a human being, a woman (consciousness is feminine in her language), because the bearer of Consciousness in our dimension is a man.

Witness, the interpreter is Rabbit, he holds the baton in his hand, he is the interpreter, he chooses the result. The rabbit symbolizes different performances in different cultures. Jelena used all the symbolism, and presented it as a toy, the discovery of quantum physics scientists awakened in her the feeling that everything we live and do is a game, which we play consciously or not.

Consciousness and the Rabbit are represented sculpturally in space, cast in polyester.

The images-collages in this opus are games with her notions of reality, personal and collective. The rabbit is present as a witness to the information of that reality.

Images in which the rabbit is not present are fields-interferences of all thoughts, possibilities of  time space, some paradigm. There are words, letters, elements, symbols as  some information and builders of the systems.

From 2020 Jelena living and working in Belgrade

Jelena has daughters,

Andjela Dostanic, at the postgraduate studies of Anthropology in Brussels,

Ana Dostanic, at the undergraduate studies of Photography and Film Camera in Belgrade.


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