Jure Kastelic explores the stereotypical expectations about socialisation in foreign countries.
23 Jan 2014
Photography BA(Hons) student Jure Kastelic has won an award in the Open Call for: The Curated Ego: What Makes a Good Selfie? competition for his project Fantasy Student Life. Here he describes his work:
These three photomontages are coming from a series entitled Fantasy Student Life, which was made a year and a half after my move to England where I’m currently studying photography. At first as an internal provocation for my loved ones it served to satisfy the stereotypical expectations about socialisation in foreign countries, and later blurred the lines between reality, fiction, expectations and desires. From appropriated imagery and my own ‘selfies’, I constructed a ‘fantastical’ representation that has no real connection to truth.
Playing with believable and fantastical, some of the collages are more authentic than others in terms of construction. However, to confirm (and further manipulate) the realness, I chose a Polaroid 600 film that cannot be manipulated in terms of reality as much as other photographic processes. It is therefore representing a trustworthy format of occurrences in the photographs, even though they are pure digital manipulations.
This project was presented with a fake letter from my ‘girlfriend’s mother’. In it she is criticising my perverse way of living and doubting my commitment to her daughter. The whole series was also presented in Lisbon as part of the Slovenian Contemporary Portrait Show. I am still collecting negative critics from online commentators who thought these pictures are real. The critics might become a bigger part of the project in the future.
The competition received around 130 submissions with a jury consisting of Diane Smyth, deputy editor of British Journal of Photography, Tim Clark, director of 1,000 words Photography Magazine and Tom Hunter, an award-winning and internationally acclaimed artist.
