Sandra Vitaljić

I Just Greet Back, 2019–ongoing

“For me being an immigrant means I will forever miss something.”

In the past several years, global attention has increasingly been directed towards the consequences of migrations – with...

“For me being an immigrant means I will forever miss something.”

In the past several years, global attention has increasingly been directed towards the consequences of migrations – with the arrival of refugees from war-stricken countries, as well as economic migrants who take the step in the hope of finding a better life somewhere else – however, the social phenomenon has been around for a long time. The decision to leave one’s country creates a whole host of consequences, being a migrant, one faces in the new surroundings. Apart from learning a new language, accepting a different mentality and adopting new cultural specificities, perhaps one of the most difficult realizations lies precisely in the fact that, in the eyes of one’s fellow residents, one will always be perceived as a foreigner, or, more precisely, a migrant.

In her latest work, entitled I just greet back, Sandra Vitaljić presents a collective diary comprised of stories of every-day struggles of women from different backgrounds now living in Sweden and sharing a fate similar to hers. After moving to Sweden in 2018, the author, prompted by her own experience of adjustment to the new country, started meeting other immigrant women and collecting their stories, strongly marked by a sense of isolation, unbelonging and exclusion. In addition to revealing their working and living conditions in the new surroundings, their stories reflect the struggle to find dignity under precarious circumstances, at the same time becoming a reflection of today’s divided society. On the walls of the Spot Gallery, the collective diary, made up of diverse stories, is complemented with the photographs taken by the author, giving rise to a powerful textual and visual symbiosis of often untold experiences.

Beloved, 2011–2013

Series of photographs was created after many years of collecting newspaper articles and police reports of killings in partner relationships. Photographs show injuries on the body and organs which subsequently proved to be lethal. Body parts that once aroused romantic and erotic feelings are depicted dead, cold, "damaged"; and a universal symbol of love – pierced heart - is given a completely different meaning. Dismembered body parts were converted into fetishized photo-objects, which evoke gifts given in the name of love - love which is itself thus marked by possession. In a moment when it becomes impossible to own a loved one, it is converted into a thing, an inanimate object which can be discarded, thus destroying the source of pain.
Through this series Beloved, I question loving relationships and destructive emotions which can arise from an idealized sense of love.

Infertile grounds

Landscapes in the photographs from the Infertile Grounds series are marked by trauma, historical events and human experience. Woods, fields and rivers are part of folk tales and myths, but...

Landscapes in the photographs from the Infertile Grounds series are marked by trauma, historical events and human experience. Woods, fields and rivers are part of folk tales and myths, but have also become part of a rhetoric legitimizing political systems and ideologies. Names like Jasenovac and Bleiburg went beyond their topographical referentiality, and each time they were mentioned included different possible interpretations and contextualisations. I was interested by places that political rhetoric had used copiously in inflammatory speeches during the 90s, places of institutionalised memory as well as those that had never been marked by a single memorial plaque. As after World War II, so after the war in the former Yugoslavia, the politics of memory labelled what needed remembering, and suppressed what it was desirable to forget.
In the Infertile Grounds series I endeavour to create a place of memory within the space of the photograph, an alternative memento that is not created by ideology, rather by the need to open up the space of remembrance for victims who are never going to acquire their own space in the official culture of memory.

About author

Sandra Vitaljić was born in Pula, in 1972. She earned her master’s degree in Photography and a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Photography from the Academy of Performing Arts, Film and TV (FAMU) in Prague. She is employed as an associate professor at the Cinematography Department of the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She was awarded CEC ArtsLink residence at the Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco (1997).

As a Fulbright fellow, she conducted her doctoral research at the Rochester Institute of Technology and at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, in Rochester, NY. She exhibited her works domestically and abroad. Her photographs are featured in the permanent collections of the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, as well as in the Polaroid collection and Camera Austria.

She won the CCN Award (Austria) and the first award at the T-HTaward@msu.hr competition. She published two books: “Infertile Grounds” and “War of Images – Contemporary war photography”.