PORTFOLIO Tina Skrlj
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, documentary-style 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.
Landscape For quite a long period in my life I could not understand/ get the beauty, the attraction of landscape photography. One day I got curious about it. This series represents my exploration, curiosity of nature, landscape.
Family portrait It is hard to live far away from the family and it always feel good to come back, even if it is only just for a short visit. This series of photos were made in one of my visits back at my parents place in Slovenia. I wanted to observe their behaviour, how do the interact between themselves since I don’t spend much time with them. Some of the images were taken spontaneously others were staged. In the staged ones my parents were told to do different poses, the point of this was for me to observe how will they react, what will come out of it and the result was always very spontaneous and hilarious in a way. The distortion of the images is a product 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. Representing an eye of the spy-in this case, me.
FOTOBOOT Series of photos taken in a Photo boot in Karlsruhe during my 10 days stay at my sisters place. My inspiration was based on Cindy Sherman and her’s conceptual portraits. I decided to use a photo boot as a media in a Museum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe. Trying to explore my face expressions, doing different positions and transforming myself to different roles, changing my identity. Some people like to say that we can be whoever we want to be and I wanted to try that even if just for a second and even if just on the (ID) pictures.
GIFT TO BARBARA This project was made in collaboration with Virginia Valente who wanted to give a photograph to her sister Barbara with her (Virginia’s) portrait imitating the portrait of à lvaro Cunhal (because of their resemblance) who was a Portuguese politician. The final result was digitally manipulated image of both of their portraits (edited by Virginia). The series represents the process itself and the final image.
Girls A documentation of two girls coming home after a long night out drinking, breaking up with a girlfriend and consequently following a breakdown.