Renata Poljak

Title: Skok / Jump
Directed and produced by Renata Poljak
Duration: 04:00
Format: digital video 4:3
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Production date: 2000
Production country: Croatia
www.renatapoljak.com

Skok / Jump
The artist climbs a diving platform at the coast. She wears a bathing suit, cap and make-up. She walks along the springboard, back and forth, repeating in French, “Shall I jump or not, shall I jump or not…”, then in Croatian, “If I jump all my make-up will be removed” and starts to walk back and forth obsessively. Her sweat makes the colour in her face drip.

“…The projection on the screen that hangs in the aerial inter-space is also blue – the sea, the sky, and a lonely female figure walking nervously, high on the diving board. The original perplexity whether to dive into water or not is expressed in different languages, which elevates it into a higher level. Renata lives in France; however, in her native country, migrations are mostly massive and brutal, and every experience of translocation/displacement is conceived as traumatic, disregarding the specific lifestyle that shapes it. There is a need to express the language trauma. The trivial outcome of narcissistic appearance endangered by the removal of make-up is deadly serious indeed. The dilemma is extremely important – “who am I and what do I want to be”, as it is expressed by Lucy Lippard in connection to the use of autobiography in the feminist art of the 70s. There is make-up involved, a classical feminist prop. But the make-up is also about appearance, about style, chains of denotators participating in the construction of gender that is not originally and naturally given. Perplexity turns into a problem, a “thing” that stands in our way, something that stops us from dying, as deduced by Vilém Flusser. In modern anthropology it is implicitly stated that one of the men’s highest capabilities is the ability to make decisions. The whole political discussion of modernity is about the question of freedom of decision-making…*

* N. Ilic, Falling into Circularity, in cat. Did she fall or was she pushed ?, Zagreb, 2001

Renata Poljak
Born in 1974, Renata Poljak grew up and graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Split and later spent a year in post-graduation (international post diploma) at the Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France. In 2002 she was a visiting artist at San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2008 she was selected for the Art In General residency program in New York. Renata’s work has been exhibited widely, through solo or group shows, biennials and film festivals. She received several awards, among them The Golden Black Box Award at the Black Box Festival in Berlin in 2006, and the T-HT award, one of the most important contemporary art awards in Croatia, in 2012. In 2010 her films were shown in Prospective Cinema (Prospectif Cinéma) in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. She also participated at Paris Photo 2010 exhibit at the Carrousel du Louvre while in October 2012 a selection of her films was on view in Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her last solo show was in the Gallery Stephan Stoyanov in New York 2013.

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