Tina Ĺ krlj photography portfolio
tinaskrlj@gmail.com +351 967 085 721
LANDSCAPE
family portrait Living away from your family can be incredibly cool and crazy but also pretty hard and challenging at times. I any case, it always feels good to be back, even if it is only for a very short amount of time. This series was made on one of my visits at my parents’ place in Sezana, Slovenia. I wanted to observe their behaviour, their daily interactions, the way they communicate with each other and see if, or how, the “home atmosphere” has changed since my last departure. Some of the images were taken spontaneously, while the others were staged. In the latter, my parents were excplicitly told to pose, in order for me to observe how they would react in terms of role-playing, the emotions this would trigger, and how it would turn out in the end. The outcome has always been very spontaneous and somehow unexpected yet intriguing. The distortion of the images is a direct consequence of them being taken as a reflection on a small TV in the kitchen or from a small LCD screen, which serves to film the outside of the front door, ultimately representing the eye of a spy - me.
FOTOBOOT Identity – how inevitably it depends on our environment, society and system? Are we really able to be what or whoever we want to be? What is truly ours and what do we pick up from the environment? To what extent are we really “we”? Environment is therefore the essential cornerstone of our identity. It gives us contents and boundaries. Without it we are probably empty. What invokes and builds our identity if not stimulus - events, objects and ideas from our environment? But here comes the problem. What does our environment really offer? What exactly makes the essential cornerstone of our identity? Are those boundaries flexible or rigid? How alike are all the contents? Are our identities also pretty much alike? Are we therefore uniformed? Nowadays the concept of individuality and freedom of choice is underlined. Is it possible we are actually going in the opposite direction? Isn’t our freedom of choice indeed very limited? Maybe this is the natural flow of evolution. It is possible there is much more diversity nowadays than in the past. What makes it so interesting is the fact that in this new, emancipated world we seem to be truly unoriginal and compliant. Maybe the media, visual culture, information flow and limitless expressions make this more obvious. Some people like to say that we can be whoever we want to be. In this project I tried to take different portraits of myself in a photo booth, doing different posses, wearing different close, choosing different attitude, just playing with the idea that I can change my identity as many times as I want and in any way that I want, to be whoever I want tobe or try to be (exploring it) if not anywhere else at least on an “I.D.” photo.
Virgínia asked me to take a simple photograph, which took a year from addressing the project until actually shooting it. She wanted to present her sister with a photograph from herself for her sister’s birthday. The advantage of her physical resemblance to Álvaro Cunhal, probably the most respected communist leader in Portugal, was one way to represent her inclinations to left wing sense of community, as sister and other else’s something. She wanted one portrait of character. These pictures are the final result of all session recorded in analog black and white film, with a tricky shutter. The chosen portrait is the biggest of the following.
This photo series was made in Portugal, during a hot summer of 2012. Thematically speaking, it’s been tackling issues of young adults amidst global financial and intimate crisis; young adults trying to figure their way out of personal turmoils and societal challenges; young adults desperately looking for any kind of emotional experience, feeling, ideal or a concept they would find worth fighting and living for. Lidia and Joana are two girls in their mid-twenties, spending most of their time out in the night, either working in bars or partying hard, not thinking too much about tomorrow. Or after tomorrow for that matter. Coming home in the morning after a night of binge drinking, Joanna experiences an episode of severe emotional distress, resulting from an emotionally abusive romantic relationship she has been suffering for years.
Yellow hair 1ST Cycle
This is still a project in progress. The topic of the project is a very intimate and personal experience of me being raped at the age of 17. In the project I am trying to explore my life now and specific areas in which the incident from 10 years ago – in sometimes very obscure and odd ways - affects my intimate life, thoughts and behavior. Conceptually speaking, I would like to approach the incident as something that had happened to me and something I still have to deal with on many different levels but at the same time does not represent the ultimate defining point of who I am today. If I am more precise, the categories that interest me the most are my own perceptions of sexuality, my relationship with my body and the bodies of the others, violence and the slippery and tricky nature of memory itself. The project is devided in different cycles. The first cycle in a way represents my creative starting point: in the beginning I was taking a lot of photos in a very raw, documentarystyle manner, portraying the scene where the incident took place and certain specific places, people and objects that were connected to and/or involved in it. On the other hand, this same phase also includes images of my current everyday life in Porto.