About ana aha

Handmade and digital drawings and paintings are central to Ana’s work. Multilayered constructions reference music, language, architecture and design all of which strongly figure in her background and the development of her artistic practices. Layering and building an image can be likened to a metronome’s pendulum, oscillating between three segments: Facts, Interpretations and Fictions - as the body of the beat keeper is synchronising and overlapping multiple planes of realities.

THE RIBBON OF TIME

Ribbon of Time connects visions of the future, contemporary ideas and knowledge derived from different cultures to create new meanings where time loses its linearity. 
Mind travelling through time and space, where nothing is forgotten and everything questions its own roots, is the place where her work begins. 
The complexity of her visual language came into existence as a result of the contradistinctions between the urgency to observe, record and react to changes within the social environment, and her everlasting need to preserve and establish a poetical, nuanced and inspirational place for imaginations and dreams.

ART & EDUCATION 

 Aside from her studio work, Ana is a lecturer and educational program developer in the field of Graphic, Drawing and Painting at Talent S p a c e, Future Class and VHS Urania, Vienna.
Since 2012 she has authored an Educational Art Program for seniors with migrational backgrounds in her Thursday Morning Lectures in Vienna. 
(For more informations about Ana’s work in this field please visit www.anajelenkovic.net)

PORTRAITS: SERIAL DOUBLES 

The work on Serial Doubles began in the late 1990s.
Sorting out photographs in the possession of portrayed persons, Ana recorded their changes through earlier images and those from the times spent with them.
Different guises were than transferred into drawings on transparent materials, foils or tracing papers. Overlapping these materials she mapped and followed the journeys of her friends building a topography of their changing psychological and existential situations. This serial is also a possibility for portrayed individuals to have insights of shifting ideas about themselves.
Serial Doubles explores how the structures of societies affect us personally considering our shifting of notions on identity and diverse theories of belonging. In this series, Ana is giving  attention to individual voices confronted with ideas of identity formed in group dynamics within particular societal shifts, and  explores how we can find new points of connectivity. 

ART IN PUBLIC SPACES: WALL PAINTINGS

In 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2015 Ana made five wall paintings in larger formats
(various formats, each 6-7x 25-38m ) in large public spaces in Austria.  
(See: www.anajelenkovic.net/art /Art in Public Spaces)

FOLDED CANVASES AND SELF MADE COLORS

Cycle of paintings: COLOR & SPACE

Cycle based on projects of art in public spaces ( 2006-2015). Working on wall paintings in larger formats opened up an opportunity to explore greater, partially vast, surfaces of applied color in different architectural settings and lighting conditions. 
The research and tactile experiences of subtle changes within expanding bodies and values of colors resulted in a cycle of paintings, Color & Space , that began in 2012 and has become a recurrent in ANA AHA‘s work. Artist used partially her own handmade colors, papers and other materials for these constructions. Her folded canvases encompass historical research about the use and preparation of pigments, and the eminence and meaning of colors within different cultures. Artist is focusing on the imaginative and psychological potential of the different hues of colors and their interaction within architectural contexts.

Paintings: White, Yellow,  Red,  Blue, Green, Gray
folded canvases and handmade colors, each 60x60x20cm, made in Vienna, 2012 - 2022
Installation: Color Wheel Baldachine
folded canvas, acrylic spray and handmade colors, 300x100x50cm made in Vienna, 2021

POSSIBILITIES OF DRAWING AND PAINTING/ PAINTED CONVERSATIONS 

Project branching out of Cross Cultural Storytelling,
one of the Talent  S p a c e  activities 2016 - 2017 in Vienna

Collaborative painting Untitled 2017

The painting Untitled 2017  was a project with refugees in collaboration with the art museum Thyssen - Bornemisza Art Contemporary 21, Students of Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, WIFI Vienna, VHS Urania and other Institutions. Untitled 2017 (600x158cm, acrylic paint, textile marker on canvas) represents the collaborative effort of seven individuals working together for the first time in a workshop on cross-cultural storytelling. All of these individual authors shared first hand experiences with the complex challenges of migration and displacement. Collaborative painting Untitled 2017  documents experiences its creators were not able to initially verbalize. Rooted in the rhythmic processes of sharing a studio space and engaging in collaborative creativity, it negotiates different forms of visual language and exchange of knowledge. This bore testament to the capacity to project communal cooperation despite the participants‘ various cultural backgrounds.

In an atmosphere based on mutual trust and collective responsibility for the outcome of the project, the various authors managed to transform their individual and cultural differences into a pool of communal resources. The tradition of storytelling here goes beyond techniques of narration to show a rich content behind their emergent stories while creating a highly differentiated visual language.
Produced over an intense period of three months, Untitled 2017  also reflects the volatile biographical conditions of the participants and the constant threat of possible deportation. In many ways, the painting operated as both an outlet and a focal point.

Untitled 2017 is based on the previous project of ANA AHA for Talent  S p a c e : Participants were working together for several months illustrating a satirical story of Syrian language teacher. Each of the participants was invited to influence and change the story in her/his own way. Artistic workshops were organised, exchanging knowledge in the field of visual arts and literature. During this project, participants started to work on canvas. (www.anajelenkovic.net/collaborations)
Painting Untitled 2017  was on view at the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna in the exhibition The Essence 2017.
(www.anajelenkovic.net/documentation/)

DRAWN CONVERSATIONS 

In the late 1990s, while at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the Institute for Painting and Graphic in expanded pictorial space, students and artists gathered from all over the world spending long days together, exchanging ideas or techniques and learning from each other. What we couldn’t verbalize, particularly if we were at loss for a term in English or German - we drew.
My work table was always covered with white sheets of paper where our collective would gather to more easily express themselves with imagery. Two spoken words coupled with three drawn lines would somehow combine themselves into a cogent visual message, creating new meanings to open and advance the conversation between us, no matter our differing cultural backgrounds or languages.
We used Drawn Conversations of personal and poetic content between materials and ideas in order to make exchanges possible. This is one of the important concepts that historically informs the body of ANA AHA’s work.

„I am coming from the language that I am slowly forgetting to the language that I yet don’t know.“ (ANA AHA)

LANGUAGE 

The artist has spent years exploring and discarding the truism of her vocabulary as if she was learning her own authentic language again. By ‘language’, she means a visual language or landscape of signs that includes the tonality of spoken words, music and color. There is something remarkable about learning to distance oneself from the verbiage of the past.  To take something that perhaps was once brought into our lives through family, social environment or media and to replenish one’s vocabulary; to clean it, and learn new ways to utilize your mother language, or to invent other ways of communicating, as it happened to ANA AHA. Sharing this experiential process can assist others in finding or revisiting their own language. 

RE:CONVIVIALITY

Drawings are sometimes open notes, inviting observers to collaborate and respond to create further layers of meanings.
The image remains open as a space of conviviality. 
If the word conviviate  can be translated as being involved in friendly, joyous and generous interactions, ANA AHA invites others through a newly minted word (as we are prone to do learning a new language) to „reconviviate“ around her work as a gathering point where institutions, participants, friends, new acquaintances and like minded persons can agreeably meet to create interactions and new content.  Drawn Conversations are sort of situational images displaying the imaginative responses of the viewer while inviting them to take a sojourn among artists‘ brushstrokes, drawn lines and other diverse creations.