The Dystopian Sceneries

The Dystopian Sceneries of Jana Stojaković

Jana Stojaković’s works bear the mark of a dark, cruel, bizarrely morbid and unfortunately closed past. The space of her artistic action greatly exceeds the boundaries of studios, exhibition spaces, galleries and Academies of Arts…

Her works remind one of an adventure; the whole of her imaged world is actually an adventure, a search for identity – personal, artistic, female, sexual, political, engaged. A strategy of resistance to the hypocrisy she feels in her surroundings paralleled with a strong need to explore body and sexuality, are reflected in her many drawings/collages, paintings, photographs and videos.

With confident accelerating movements, just like “the world” which has become an infinite puzzle of motion pictures, Jana approaches the margins and borders of society, its underbelly. Setting her models in abandoned, filthy spaces, such as horror movies, Jana investigates the world of parallel, sometimes completely opposite “realities”; from glamorous kitsch to transvestites, prostitutes and pornographic scenes. Her work aims at the subversion of the superficial and banal aesthetic surfaces that she sees in the contemporary world, the emptiness, emotional stereotypes and all the social clichés of the good life.

Her works symbolically indicate the terrible mark of wars and bloody clashes, hate, fanaticism and humiliations, to which human beings have been and unfortunately still are exposed. Jana visually shapes the inner scenaries of individual destinies as a complex of unsatisfied desires and disappointments – full of melancholy, anxiety and bodily decay.

Milica Stojaković