Luka Pešun

"Do it Within Your Four Walls"

Conceived as a response to the catchphrase “Do that in your own four walls”, this series of photographs portrays the everyday life of LGBTIQ+ people within the space of their...

Conceived as a response to the catchphrase “Do that in your own four walls”, this series of photographs portrays the everyday life of LGBTIQ+ people within the space of their home.

I reconstruct moments of their everyday life in order to create the impression of documentation through staging, trying to maintain an objective gaze. In the process of creating this series of photographs, I learn more about our collective and individual reality and dismantle my own prejudices.

These photographs are my contribution to the existing discourse of gender, sex and sexual diversity in the areas it seems lacking, allowing me a better insight into those levels of relationships and identities that eluded me.

What Do You Mean You Didn't Know?

As an adult, I take childhood photos from family albums and recontextualise them through appropriation in order to look back on my growing up. The selection of photographs is intended...

As an adult, I take childhood photos from family albums and recontextualise them through appropriation in order to look back on my growing up. The selection of photographs is intended as a letter to my parents and speaks about the development of a queer identity in a humorous way.

The essence of the work is partly contained in the dichotomy of the free child that I was and the restrained adult I am now; years after self-correcting all of my gestures, actions, and speech... In order to fit into the heteronormative narrative of the idea of what a man is.

Domestic

Domestic is a photo series exploring home as a space marked by the personal trauma of an attempt at being forcibly outed in early adolescence. A place that represented the...

Domestic is a photo series exploring home as a space marked by the personal trauma of an attempt at being forcibly outed in early adolescence. A place that represented the idea of security became something entirely different. My formative years were spent in fear and hiding, while my home became a version of the panopticon.

Employing the photo camera to delve into what home represents for me and recording that and those who give me a sense of home, forced me to confront what had been tacitly left unsaid, long swept under the carpet. The camera actively, yet subconsciously, strived to record primarily (and sometimes solely) those who have always lightened the burden of existence, my grandparents. They were my sanctuary since my earliest childhood, and later on, I assumed a portion of the care for them.

By taking photos, I unravelled the old bonds between myself and that space. The long-standing feeling of not belonging was replaced by a new one. The space of trauma became a space of healing. My personal, but also, of my family.

About author

Luka Pešun (Zagreb, 1990) in his artwork uses the medium of photography to explore themes such as identity, family and belonging, being essentially concerned with context and how changing it inverts reading. He studied Fashion Design at the Faculty of Textile Technology and graduated in Photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in 2019. Winner of the 2016 Rector’s Award.
He has participated in various group and individual exhibitions. His diploma thesis work titled “Do it Within Your Four Walls” was exhibited in 2019 at the ADU Gallery f8 and as part of the Poreč Dox festival, and in 2022 in Pula as part of the Process 2022 event. A photograph from the graduation series was also exhibited on a billboard in Zagreb in 2020 as part of the Area/Surface 6 program. A portion of the wider cycle of the photographic series Domestic was exhibited in Split in 2021 as part of the qEXHIBITIONS program and later that year in Pula at the invitation of the association Proces. The following year, he presented the same work in Zagreb as a part of the 36th Youth Salon, under the theme “Parasites”. He presented the work titled Touch at the group exhibition Then and Again. Rethinking Ritual in Contemporary Balkans, held in Thessaloniki, Greece in 2024.

Luka Pešun

"Do it Within Your Four Walls"

What Do You Mean You Didn't Know?

Domestic

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