Valentina Knežević (Split, Croatia, 1989) lives and works in Frankfurt. Her art develops at the intersections of moving images, photography, performance and theatre, through a research which actively involves biographies, bodies and space.
After a master’s degree in Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, she enrolled at the Städelschule, attending Douglas Gordon’s masterclass.
Knežević explores the relationships that exist between theatre, cinema and figurative and performative arts in relation to social issues.
Her works have been displayed in personal exhibitions at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2019), 1822-Forum (2017) and the Jean-Claude Meier Gallery (2016). Moreover, she participated in numerous international collective exhibitions, including After US (MAXXI-Centro Pecci, 2021), And This is Us (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2021), Unreal Reality (Von&Von Gallery, 2020), VISIO: Moving Images After Post-Internet (Palazzo Strozzi, 2019), Air Conditioned (Städel Museum, 2019), COOP (Bangkok Biennale, 2018) and at the 64th International Short Film Festival di Oberhausen. In 2021 she was awarded the Hessian Cultural Foundation Scholarship.
WORK ON DISPLAY
Voiceover, 2017
HD video, color, sound, 6’35’’
Voiceover (2017) is a video exploring and reflecting to the audience the thoughts, memories and traumas of a professional soldier through the enactment of a precise body-space-voice dialectic. The performer acts out a precise choreography made of movements, alternating moments of stillness and motion over which a voiceover – monotonous, impersonal, detached, somewhere between self-persuasion and shell shock – flows, disconnected from the images.
The performer moves against a cold and aseptic architectural space which contrasts with the subject of the narrative, while the tone of the narrating voice reverberates, producing an effect of estrangement.
By means of such an anti-heroic narrative, war is represented from an unusual perspective, thus highlighting the psychological disorientation of a soldier and opening an insight into his inner universe.
