This woman is called Jasna is an episodic project which takes the form of a montage of fiction, historical fact, using the ICTY archives and court transcripts, job applications and descriptions, as well as an accumulation of detail from interpreters, cleaners, ballistic experts, silviculturalists, forensic anthropologists, technicians, and characters from Jasna’s prewar youth. Using Jasna’s own memories, my memories, the discourses that framed us as subjects, the migrations that marked us as displaced and never in synch with our own histories, this project takes as its starting point a documentary approach, but implies a narrativisation and fictionalisation of discontinuous histories. (2013-2018). In episode Jasna 01/Pictures Jasna is a student in 1991 in Croatia, then she is an emigre in the Netherlands working in a fetish rubber factory and later an administrator at the ICTY. Jasna ponders the meaning of the black frame in analogue photography and mourns its loss in digital photography as she contemplates the enlarged pixels of a streamed court hearing.
NICOLE HEWITT is a visual artist working in film, video, installation, performance, spoken word and text. Hewitt completed an MA in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Art and PhD in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2013. Her work is concerned with memory, micro history and narrative as mediated through technologies of representation and preservation. She has completed a long-term episodic series of performance/films/texts This Woman is Called Jasna (2015). Hewitt has recently completed the project Women Minor Speculations through a psychedelic exploration of the Neolithic figurines of South Eastern Europe, from Croatia via the Danube to the Black Sea (2016-2021). Her work has been recently shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Pogon Centre for Independent Culture – Zagreb; Sonic Acts Academy- Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka; Invisible Savicenta – Savicenta; international festivals such as Days of Croatian Film, Hiroshima International Festival of Animation, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Festival of New Film Split, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF, New Media Festival Seoul, Mumbai International Film Festival, Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, etc. Retrospectives of her film, video and animation work were parts of Holland International Animation Film Festival Utrecht (2007) and ANIMATEKA (2006), Nicole Hewitt, Museums Quartier Vienna, 2004; Nicole Hewitt, Galerija Nova, Zagreb, 2004; UrbanFestival, Zagreb, 2011; Spaport Biennial 2009/2010, Banja Luka; Women With Vision, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 2008, Insert, Retrospective of Croatian Video Art, MSU, Zagreb, 2006; Here Tomorrow, MSU Zagreb, 2002., etc.). Since 2017 she has been part of the performance collective Soundspiels (Vida Guzmić, Nicole Hewitt, Ivan Slipčević) working on projects exploring the borders of Europe, the material history of the Atlantic Wall and ideas about landscape and its construction. The project involves periods of walking and fieldwork on the North Sea and the Baltics. Hewitt is cofounder of the artist run collective Studio Pangolin and teaches at The Department of Animation and New Media of The Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. Lives and works in Zagreb and London.
