Jelena Viskovic
Info about the residency
1. August 2025 - 1. October 2025Tallinn Art Hall: Tallinn, Estonia
About the artist
Jelena Visković is an artist born in 1989 in Zagreb, raised between Belgrade and Budapest, currently living and working in London. She works with recreation, situation, disobedience and play to explore how bodies - social, political and technological are shaped by systems of power. Her films, games and sculptural works incorporate playful, animated, talking objects that make their way into technologically deterministic systems. Borrowing from a carnivalesque logic, they become rebellious but approachable, attempting to resist the enclosures of borders, institutions, archives and databases. Her recent film Motonation explores body-politics and performance in former Yugoslavia and the multifaceted meaning of movement in the region today. It was an extension of a larger body of work called Volumes. The series uses situation and spatial choreography mixed with game design methods to talk about social, political and environmental movements throughout the 20th century that were seen as radical at the time - as in, moments known for their potential for social change, but retrospectively often viewed as unfulfilled promises from a past era.About the project
This project is a moving-image work based in a resort, reimagining the literary trope of Eastern European spa-novela as a stage or situation for introspection and healing, but also where underlying social tension can unfold.Set in a spa in the Baltics, the film will follow a group of aging women navigating leisure time at a resort through a set of obstacles; newly promoted rejuvenation therapies, ecological collapse, conflict and digital enclosures staged as wellness regimes. Blending spatial storytelling and character journey of the spa-novel to engage with themes of conflict, extraction, restoration, and unexpected faces of resistance.
The setting serves as a space for reflecting on the connections between technology, environmental policy, and necropolitics. Thinking through the obsession with aging in contemporary culture, mirroring the duality of the privileges of aging and the fears connected to this process; who gets to age in the contemporary (and future) society and by what means? Addressing regional stories through the complexities and uncertainties in the global present.