The 51st Zagreb Salon Challenges to Humanism present 

NICOLE HEWITT IN COLLABORATION WITH JASMINA RAVNJAK, VIDA GUZMIĆ AND IVAN SLIPČEVIĆ

This Woman’s Name is Jasna ep 06 Metaphors, draft for a historical novel in the form of a ten-episode film

On Thursday, July 7, 2016 at 7.00 PM
Prsten Gallery 

In the sixth episode, Jasna contemplates the power of metaphors, archives, repositories and models.

As part of the film mutation project that she has been working on for two years, Nicole Hewitt is presenting the draft for a historical novel in the form of multiple-sequel film/performance. Its starting point are the interspace between personal and official histories, the process of existence and absence from media, archives and society, the translation and transmission of social perceptions, the admission and omission from a collective memory of content, messages, images, films and theories. Building on the memories of an expert witness, her own personal memories, Jasna’s memories, the discourses that have shaped her as an author, the theories that have shaped her as a subject, the portrayals that have shaped her as an object, the war migrations that have shaped us all as dislocated and never in harmony with our own history, Hewitt’s historical novel in the form of a film allows an approach that derives from the documentary, but implies a narrative procedure and the fictionalizing of interrupted histories in various forms – film, text, slide show, performance / recitation.

On the project:

In 1991, Jasna was 23 years old. She studied comparative literature and philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. In 2015, Jasna is 46 years old and works as an administrator at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Hague. (…)

Nicole Hewitt has been expanding her previous work in the media of film, video, text and performance towards exploring the possibilities of documentary form within a fictional structure, while examining the specific qualities of film, verbal expression and the relationship between “the representation” and “the rhetoric”, as well as “fictional” and “real” time. Her new pieces, such as the performance series This Woman’s Name is Jasna focus more on expressing the language in fiction, recitative form, song and testimony.

In addition to film, Hewitt is engaged in the study of contemporary art in theory and practice. In 2013, she completed a PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, with a doctoral thesis on the relationship between film, narration, dance, history and rhetoric.

She has been working as a curator since 2003, having conceived and realized a number of workshops, exhibitions and seminars. Hewitt currently teaches at the Department of animated film and new media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From 2009 to 2011, she was an external associate at the Department of Visual Cultures of the Goldsmiths College, and from 2014 to 2015 at the Cass School of Fine of the Art London Metropolitan University.