The Exhibition: Rehearsing Family by Petra Mrša (Mali Salon, MMSU, Rijeka)
Petra Mrša
Rehearsing Family
9 October – 25 October 2015, Mali salon, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka
How can well-established intimate relationships – whose participants are lulled in their passive, all too familiar, apathetic roles – change? How can these roles be challenged without the inclusion of the existing system of knowledge? If knowledge, as M. Foucault and J. Butler explain, can be changed with direct experiences, then knowledge about oneself and others involved in an intimate relationship can be questioned through activities that are different from all the previously shared activities which generated the existing system of knowledge.
Wanting to examine the power of such a direct experience, I decided to create new situations within a community where I have established the most deeply-rooted relationships – my nuclear family – by asking each member to propose some previously unexplored activity in which we can all engage.
Petra Mrša
Petra’s layered portraits bring out the literal meaning in the family (re)union. These people literally flow into each another! They vibrate at the same frequency while remaining quite distinct.
For her photographic journal, she chooses a non-contaminated space and a displaced moment in time. The landscape of Velebit, within which the narrated journey takes place, is almost divine. There is no sound, and still there is no deafness. There is no movement, and sill it is not frozen. The images literally vibrate leaving the sounds inaudible and movements elusive
An extract from Marina Viculin’s text
Being highly directed, Petra’s photographsare as if trying to visualize and uncover the structure of the family mythology which is represented through family photography. When we take photos in a family surrounding, we are not doing it a vacuum, but rather we’re responding to the dominant mythologies of family life, to the concepts which we have inherited and images which we have adopted through media. These internalized images reflect upon us, introducing us to those unique glanceswhich family members exchange amongst each other and whichin turn define us. Petra’s photographsare thus becoming a document through which we can read and reflect on the complexities of exchangingglances.
An extract from Nataša Šuković’s text
Petra Mrša was born in 1985, in Rijeka. She graduated in Sociology and Psychology, and Rehearsing Family was her graduation work from the Photography Department at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She had ten solo exhibitions(Hoxton Gallery, UK, Savignano Immagini, Italy, Central Station, Slovenia, VN Gallery, KIC, Gallery Waldinger, Kortil Gallery…) and twenty group exhibitions (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb City Museum, ULUPUH, POGON Jedinstvo, SC Gallery …).She participated in art colonies and on multimedia projects: IS_land 2 (2013), Pristajanje (2013), Island Map 2 (2014), Photobook event (2014). She received the following awards: Nude award at Rovinj Photodays (2010), two Special Recognition Awards for Young Authors at Rovinj Photodays (2011 and 2012), Savignano Immagini Best Portfolio Award (2012), and she was nominated for ESSL Art Award in 2013.
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