A Constant State of Becoming Exhibition: Interview with the Artist. Jasmine Bakalarz.
After being part of A Constant State of Becoming exhibition, curated by Marcela Villanueva, Jasmine Bakalarz reflects on her art in an interview with Myriam Martínez.
Who are you?
I’m a photographer and visual artist. I work with cultural projects and cultural management. I’m very interested in photography and art in the public sphere — that is, the public space, physically, but also art spaces open to the public. I’ve also studied psychology. And in recent years, I’ve started to get more involved with moving images.
The starting point of all your work is portrait.
Yes, especially of children. I’ve been photographing childhood in different social contexts, in different countries, for 20 years. I’m half Canadian, and my first series of photographs, in college, was of american beauty pageants (like in the movie Little Miss Sunshine). That’s when I realized I was interested not only in children, but also in these pageants themselves — where certain social aspects are exaggerated: I photographed bodybuilders, I also did a series on a dog show, etc.
How did your work develop?
Staying in Poland was an artistic and personal expansion for me: I continued photographing children, but in my grandparents’ village; I used photographs of my father, a Holocaust survivor, in different german displaced persons camps after the war; I included landscapes in my work, too — although I always treated the landscapes as if they were portraits. All on film, so I also started filming a bit.
When I came back to Argentina, I also had the opportunity to participate in a “Yo No Fui” project in a women’s prison. The peculiarity of Argentina’s prisons is that women can be with their children until they are five years old, so I was able to see the first — and perhaps the only — photographs of those childhoods. I worked primarily on documenting the creation of these photos, and we made catalogs of each exhibition. I also worked extensively in a museum, exploring how artists used family photos and incorporated them into their work. I think photographs are like the work of each family. I’ve always sought that relationship between memory and photography.
That memory, the themes you cover, have a considerable political charge.
Yes, I thought about it for the first time when I had to write my Master’s thesis. But I think my most political side developed at a professional level, working at the Haroldo Conti Cultural Memory Center for a ministry — fighting for the rights to the space, the people we represented, the artists who exhibited, etc. — From my artistic side, when I took photos of children, for example, in beauty pageants, I wasn’t interested in criticizing them directly; it was obvious in my gaze.
When I was selected to attend the first World Press Photo Workshop in Mexico, I was surrounded by photojournalists and realized I had nothing to say in that field; my work was much more subtle. The idea of having an exhibition of such sensitive photos, displating such brutal moments from other people’s lives, it’s conflictive for me. And it’s approach wasn’t artistic enough for me, either. I also didn’t think I fit entirely within contemporary art; it seemed too banal, putting the self above all else. I’m still exploring where my art is gonna take me, no matter how I label it.
My work may be a bit like my form of activism, but photography has to go beyond that. The political context is already there, not just because of my father and grandparents, my mother was exiled during the Argentine dictatorship, too. So of course my gaze is influenced by what was lost, the absence — how these historical moments of genocide and war intersect with the lives of people, in families. Especially exile and immigration, but it’s more than that as well.
“Motherhood”, part of A Constant State of Becoming, exhibited at Bardo, is “A photographic diary which attempts to reconcile a new life as a mother and as a photographer in a foreign land. An impossible pursuit to document moments during these first years they won’t remember”.
A Constant State of Becoming is your first exhibition not only at Bardo, but also in Berlin.
Yes. In Buenos Aires, I’ve had solo exhibitions in museums and done many incredible things, but I got stuck after the Master’s. I started taking digital photos because I couldn’t photograph children before they were four or five years old: film takes a long time, the camera’s mirror has a whole process and it takes time as well; they have to stay still, and that’s difficult to achieve. Documenting this stage of childhood, which I didn’t for others, put a lot of pressure on me when it came to my own children. I felt I had to do it as a mother — and being a children’s photographer, even more! —, but I couldn’t do it.
Archivo Madre, a Karne Kunst project development lab, helped me with this. We did lecture-performances that became a collective performance, and that’s where the idea of letting go of the thought I had until then of “I’m no longer an artist; I’m a mother and I have a full-time job. The time to be an artist passed me by since I arrived in Berlin” emerged. So I collected some material. For this show as well, the two photos in which my kids are older were taken for A Constant State of Becoming. Otherwise, it was too much pressure for me. I was also learning to be a mother without my mother being present — thinking that she doesn’t know my children and won’t know them, and vice versa — and that whole issue also permeates those photos for the exhibition. There are many layers.
And layers not only in my work, but in this whole experience as a whole. Justina and I knew each other from university, and she was my link with the other girls. I think we (who call our group Mirantes) do the same thing as Karne Kunst, in a more informal way. For me, what is most important is the process and not the final result, sharing it.
What do you plan to do in the future?
I want to expand my moving portraits. For my thesis, I created a piece called “Moving Stills”, which basically depicts people from Poland sitting, looking at me, and thinking I’m taking a photo of them — but I’m actually filming them. I hadn’t thought about it before, but perhaps the movement adds a touch of humor. I want to keep exploring movement but in a static way, I wouldn’t dare venture out with the camera in hand; and sound kind of terrifies me, I’d have to research it thoroughly to add it to my work.
Also, in the live performance for Mother Archive, I started talking about a lot of things about my family genetics—although it wasn’t my idea at first—which I hope my work will now begin to document, the whole issue of breast cancer in families of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. I took photographs of my family, of children, what I’d been doing, but sort of following the chronology of the gene. I’d like to start portraying it, but I don’t know how yet; I’d have to become a different kind of photographer to tell this story.
Myriam Martínez
