YU: The Lost Country

About The Exhibition

Belfast Exposed presents YU: The Lost Country by Dublin based artist Dragana Jurisic. At the centre of this project lies the extraordinary travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), written by Anglo Irish writer Rebecca West in 1937, charting her journey through Yugoslavia. The resulting work, initially intended as a snap book, spiralled into half a million words, and became a portrait not just of Yugoslavia, but of Europe on the brink of the Second World War.

West thought of Yugoslavia as her motherland. By its very nature Yugoslavia was a land of displaced peoples and this was a fate that West shared. Born to an Anglo-Irish family, she never felt like she truly belonged anywhere. Dragana Jurisic was born in Yugoslavia and describes her practice as being produced from the position of an exile:

“Now, more than twenty years after the war(s) started, I began to recall and question my own memories of both the place I was born and events personally experienced. I am calling myself an exile, and not an expatriate – because I can't, even if I wanted to - return 'home'. During the 1990 census, I was denied the right to be Yugoslav, the nationality I identified myself with until then. (Being a child of a Croatian father and a Serbian mother, this left me somewhat confused.) The census researcher's answer to why this was impossible, mirrored very closely something that Mussolini said: "Yugoslavia does not exist. It is a heterogeneous conglomerate which you cobbled together in Paris.’ In search of both the lost country and the lost identity, I started retracing West’s journey and re-interpreting her masterpiece by using photography and text in an attempt to re-live my experience of Yugoslavia and to re-examine the conflicting emotions and memories of the country that ‘was’.”

The series of photographs exhibited in Belfast Exposed are the outcome of Jurisic’s committed retracing of West’s journey over a three year period, visiting the exact locations and seeking out similar revelatory narratives. The final images capture unexpected and often uncanny parallels to West’s text and delve into the artist’s understanding of her own history. Displayed alongside the photographs are first edition copies of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon that Jurisic has had re-bound, inserting her own photographs at specific pages relating to the text.