Dragana Jurisic’s photographic quest for her long-lost aunt

Dragana Jurisic’s approach to photography is both investigative and poetic. For her searies Yu: The Lost Country, which made it onto our selection of best photo books from the new east, she embarked on a journey searching for traces of her home land, Yugoslavia, which broke up in 1991. With her new project My Own Unknown, she returns to the topic of home, this time by focussing on the disappearance of her aunt Gordana Čavić during the 1950s, who was thought to have moved to Paris assuming multiple identities.

Linking her aunt to the “drowned Mona Lisa”, a mysterious figure discovered in the River Seine, whose deathmask inspired Man Ray and Albert Camus among others, Jurisic tackles not only national but female identity, in particular the topic of the female muse. The story is split into multiple chapters and presented across photographs, polaroids, light boxes and notebooks.

My Own Unkown will be on show from 23 June till 28 July at Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, where it will appear alongside a new body of photographic work by Irish artist Paul Gaffney, centred around the his nocturnal wanderings. Find more information on the upcoming exhibition here.