ANA OPALIĆ
Self-portraits
1994 - 2023
Somewhere
"... In the series of photographs by Ana Opalić entitled Self-portraits, which has to be considered as work in progress, signified melancholy has been deployed in the sense of a rhetorical figure the performative of which is manifested in ‘providing a way out of the melancholy of normative femininity’.
Notably, within the discursive space of each individual photographic image which structures the self-portrait, melancholy, as a rhetorical figure, is produced by the relation between the author’s figure– its place, the mode of its positioning in space – and the landscape captured in the frame. In that frame we often see something that can, culturologically, be perceived as a melancholic scene: a solitary figure positioned in a specific ‘wild’, rock-bound landscape, or on a cliff overhanging the sea from which the view, paradoxically, extends into infinity.
Elsewhere, she opts for a forest where the enclosed quality of the scene, a kind of stunted perspective, evokes different symbolic and metaphoric meanings related to the notions of fear and danger. The figure of melancholy is produced through contrasting the dramatic quality of landscape achieved by the procedure of an almost film-like phrasing, and stillness of the figure the title of the work denoted as both the subject and the object of the gaze.
However, if in the symbolic (Oedipal) system, a phallus is the universal signifier which can play its role only if hidden, i.e. as the sign of latency affecting everything that is subjected to signification through the mere fact of being erect (aufgehoben) in the function of a signifier, then melancholy in the symbolism of the scene represented in the photographs by Ana Opalić functions as a scenery behind which an active female gaze is hidden: the gaze that undermines the phallic economy of meanings.
By playing with the pragmatism of a photographic image, or rather with the properties of the medium itself, the series of photographic self-portraits simultaneously constructs the figure of melancholy and divests it of meaning..."
Leonida Kovač