Thicker than water

By Johanna Bear, assistant curator, contemporary Australian art, AGNSW

Jelena Telecki’s work is sumptuous, magnetic and unnerving. Fragmentary moments, cryptic figures and locales unknown emerge in paintings and sculptures that rouse our psychic depths like a dream, or a nightmare. Embedded within these enigmas are moments of care and intimacy, fear and vulnerability, resistance and sacrifice that compel us to gaze into ourselves and each other.

Telecki is driven by curiosity. ‘I am drawn to the relationship between the real and the imagined,’ the Sydney-based artist says, ‘where the imagined comes from a place of truth, or seeking it, while the real is never understood as absolute, but something that is interpreted and experienced.’

This is evident in the painting Mushrooms 2 2021, held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection, where an elegantly attired, gender-ambiguous figure traverses an oversized mushroom forest. Much is left to the viewer’s imagination. For some it may evoke the fantastical world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for others, the biological marvel of mycelial root networks. Telecki layers ambiguity into her art, using it as a portal to ‘worlds that can be recognised as improbable, but never impossible’.

This same impulse is present in Telecki’s latest exhibition, Mothers, Fathers, showing in the Art Gallery’s North Building. It is her first solo presentation at a major Australian art museum and the first in the new Contemporary Projects series, focusing on New South Wales artists.

Telecki premieres a suite of paintings newly developed for the Art Gallery that explore how spectres of history and inheritance continue to haunt the present. ‘This connection with those who were here before us, and those who are coming after us, is unbreakable,’ she says.

Through ideas of family, literal and metaphoric, her works probe the physical, emotional and psychological legacies passed across generations. This is intimated through images of parents and prodigal children, but also allusions to the kinship forged through national identity.

Beneath Telecki’s fogs of paint lurk the frustrations of bygone times. Indeed, she describes the mood of these works with the Serbian word nespokojstvo, meaning ‘foreboding uneasiness’. There is love here, but also angst and rebellion.

Displaced from modern-day Croatia to Serbia at the onset of the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), a series of ethnic conflicts, insurgencies and wars of independence, the artist migrated to Australia in 1999. Even with distance, Telecki’s connection to her region of origin endures. ‘The horror of the war, the losses we faced as a family and a nation, left a great impact on me,’ she says, ‘and with it came my attraction to working with themes of power and powerlessness, the masters and the servants.’

Several works obliquely recall this history and harbour ‘a desire to push back and sabotage the systems we inherited’. The childhood home of Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito makes an appearance, as do the Yugoslav Partisans, a communist-led, anti-fascist force that resisted the Axis powers during World War II. The bonds of comradery and allegiance, through pursuit of a shared cause, loom large. Yet Telecki also sees ‘tenderness, hinting at hope and the possibility of resolution’.

Similar dualities echo in the exhibition’s titular works, Mothers and Fathers, which depict female and male busts. Faces cast upward, the duo lurch forth from oval frames with an imposing grandeur. Reminiscent of ancient sculptures immortalising gods, goddesses and luminaries, their regal stature is offset by a ghostly countenance that recalls another use for ancient busts: to depict deceased kin.

In some ways fearsome, these maternal and paternal figures are still fragile and fallible. Their humanity is made manifest by extended canvas ‘tails’, inspired by images of torn and muddied wedding dresses, that cascade crumpled and dirty beneath each portrait. Like once-pristine white gowns, Telecki’s figures are not confined to the protective bosom of sacral architecture but exposed to the torments of nature and mortality like the rest of us.

Alongside these existential musings, Telecki also imbues her work with levity and humour. Her paintings have long seduced viewers with the spirited poses and theatrical costumes of their figures, as well as deft renderings of glossy fabrics and voluptuous inflatables. These playful textures aren’t only visually appealing but symbolic.

The shiny, skintight gimp suits wrapping many of Telecki’s characters are an important recurring motif for dynamics of power and dominance. Taut strictures of latex and leather become ciphers for the forces that shape and constrain human behaviours and social structures. Given their use in BDSM (erotic practices involving bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism), these suits also lean into the psychosexual, and inject tickles of the absurd into more political themes.

Slick black leather ensembles are dotted throughout the exhibition to signify the ‘experienced inevitability of the roles we are given – in a family and in life’. This includes the societal pressures and biological intuitions of parenthood.

In a standout work, Majka, translating to ‘mother’, a busty torso rejects modest maternal conventions in a form-fitting bondage suit with pearl droplet nipples. She subverts expectations to breastfeed and nourish as her milk is only ornamental. As in the related painting Inheritance, which depicts a waist cinched to comical extremes, viewers can sense the pleather’s compression of the body and its resulting discomfort. Or perhaps cheeky pleasure? Telecki invites us into these private moments and yet we remain distanced. What is withheld from each image is as crucial as what is shown, with tight cropping leaving us unable to read expressions or emotions. Instead we must envision this ourselves.

In Mothers, Fathers, Telecki interrogates the present by revisiting the past, with all its aching dread and aspiration. She forces us to face the ghosts of histories personal, cultural and familial, and bear witness to their uncomfortable truth. Even if we’d rather look away.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine