PM Gallery
Trg žrtava fašizma bb

Jadranka Kosorčić: Blind Date, Munich 2007. /2008.
September 2 - September 14, 2008.

Wanted
Jadranka Kosorcic is in search of, in search of potential models of identification. She is looking for them by means of advertisement, e-mails, asking people directly or distributing flyers with the following lines: “Artist is looking for people m/f willing to pose for a portrait. Time spent: 1-3h. Send photo to kosorcic@hotmail.com.”Once she found a person, with whom she is able to make a special connection of identification, they meet in her studio, they talk, communicate, and Jadranka Kosorcic takes a portrait. The result of this artistic process ranges somewhere between Comic, wanted photo and Andy Warhol.
The aesthetic strategy not only reveals the created surface of the drawn portraits, but documents the realization of identification with various persons of different sexes. Today the act of identification is the very essence of identity. In view of that Wolfgang Welsh wrote in terms of cultural criticism: “Identity doesn’t result quasi-biologically from the development of an indivisible core of personality, but from the act of identification.” He postulates on the contrary the possibility of “multiple identities” (1) according to a person’s identification with several “types and roles”. Thus Jadranka Kosorcic presents in her work the process of identification beyond the identical, beyond the eternal “one” of the old subject.
While in his essay “Identity in Transition” (1990) Wolfgang Welsch still believes in an “unrestricted absorption” of the models, i.e. in an indissoluble multiple identity; Jadranka Kosorcic shows in her portraits that the necessary effort of identification and the corresponding aesthetic structure represent only a sort of “identikit pictures” (JK). These phantoms signify an approach to something – which the artist calls a “between”, folding the “Being” of the artist to meet the “Being” of the painted model. This attempt of portraits becoming self-portraits is instable and contains a collapse. The problem is naturally complex, but two focal points may be singled out: the “Being” of the artist changes constantly, whereas the image, the medium of record is a rigid system despite of its sketchy appearance – once fixed it is established. The work of Jadranka Kosorcic is fugitive, because she is aware of the distance to the image (2) . Roland Barthes expresses the very same thing regarding a photographic self-portrait: “Myself never coincidences with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn; and myself which is light, divided, dispersed.”

Raimar Stange

(1) Wolfgang Welsch refers to Cindy Shermann’s the “Stills”. Jadranka Kosorcic relates a role-play of her earlier works to the very same artist.

(2) Jadranka Kosorcic is aware of the fugitive nature of the act of identification. That’s why her work differs from the early portraits of Elizabeth Peyton. The US-American artist may have treated the matter of identification with a portrayed model, but has hardly questioned the structure.