The exhibition Ghosts of New York by Jelena Vukotić, a photographer from Pula who lives in Los Angeles, was opened on Friday at the Makina Gallery. The exhibition is made up of some 15 large format photographs taken from a figurative window, from which one can look onto the shifted and fragmented reality, sometimes out of focus and often wondrous.
Hassan Abdelghani, head of the Makina Gallery, gave a brief speech in his cheery tone, welcoming the visitors, and said he was pleased to have another author in the traditional annual opening on the Friday before the Festival officially opens. Zlatko Vidačković also spoke to the visitors briefly, saying that the exhibitions are an important part of the Festival’s programme, and that he was pleased to have Makina Gallery continuing its traditional involvement in the Festival.
The author, a graduate of the famous FAMU Academy in Prague, kept a very low profile and her husband Mike Cahill, director and screenwriter of Another Earth and I Origins, spoke on her behalf.
Cahill said that Jelena, apart from being his favourite artists, is like a microscope they have recently bought for their daughter: she shows us things we would otherwise not see at all. “She opens a window into metaphysical worlds, in the same way the microscope shows us microscopic worlds, and a telescope shows us distant worlds.” In this case, it is ghosts of New York, where the two met. Cahill says that, by walking around the gallery and looking at the photographs, questions about perception will inevitably come to mind, questions about what it means to see and how we actually see. In fact, we look at things driven by our emotions - fear and want, for example - and these emotions then rise from the objects that we are observing. This is precisely what he loves about Jelena - the layering, the mystical, the magical - which makes the experience of the photographs a matter of a process, not an automatic reaction. Cahill thanked his wife for being a ‘scientist of the art’ of sorts, and invited the visitors to look around the exhibition.
Jelena Vukotić was born in Pula. She graduated in Fine Arts at the FAMU Academy in Prague. Her photographs have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Forbes, etc.
