Paula Tončić: "LEL"

10th–28th February, 2025

Set up photos: Ivan Buvinić

LOUD EYES LOU

The focus of Paula Tončić’s work is the enigmatic person named Lou. Their appearance is eccentric and their fashion style intriguing, connected to queer aesthetics, arousing attention and challenging social norms. We do not know much about the mysterious Lou’s identity, apart from what is revealed to us from the photographic notes in the artist’s archive of encounters – a sort of visual diary that is the result of researching people’s interactions on a platform for selling used items.

We form an idea of her on the basis of a leather jacket rather than a physical presence, a photographic print of their image on an aluminium plate, the disappearing visual evidence of the physical existence modelled on the aesthetics of low-budget horror films or, for instance, the stylistic clues from fetishistic magazines that we know both the artist and Lou avidly collect. Delineating the character of the protagonist with only the hints of stylistic properties, which the artists ties to identity issues, she examines how visual culture shapes us and what role artistic expression might play in the readings of these layers of perception.

LOUD EYES LOU is a project that explores the relationships between viewing, community, isolation, physical and virtual presence, documentation, durability and consumability and the creation of perceptual connections, in a context in which these connections themselves become tools for the deconstruction of reality. The topic of the female gaze, in the sense in which the feminist discourse began to problematise it in the late 1970s, when the “object” of observation becomes the subject, is here observed through a reflection on the curated creation of self-image for “others’ eyes”. In this sense, there is a divergence from the “expected” models of behaviour, action or creation, while the complex systems of internal and external stimuli (de)construct the image of social reality. This is further aided by the sound element of the work, hidden behind the ambiguous name of LEL[1] – an abbreviation for expressing cruel laughter, which the subject here turns to their advantage.

Ivana Završki

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[1] LEL – laughing even louder, a derivative of LOL

Paula Tončić (Zagreb, 1997) graduated in Animation and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Moving to Berlin after her studies, her artistic work explores the archiving, classification and documentation of strange objects. Highlighting their grotesque characteristics, she works with the boundaries between reality and fiction, with a focus on a young female’s experience, the female gaze, and intimacy. Inspired by fictional literature and trash horror cinema, she explores liminal spaces and physical as well as semantic transformations of materials between different mediums. She is the winner of the 37^th Youth Salon Grand Prix.