Ana Aleksić / Betwixted

Handmade artist book. Edition of 180. In-house riso printed on 120gsm offset paper with hand-screenprinted covers on silver 240gsm paper.

"The negatives the artist used were found at the flea market. These are photographs from the 1970s and 1980s pornographic magazines. That’s where the story becomes complicated and, at the same time, confirms the nature of the photographic image and the treatment of the woman as a fetish. These are not originals but negatives of rephotographed images from magazines made for private use.

Apart from the original author (or several that took photographs for these magazines), there was another one, and, in the end, the artist herself stepped in and made collages by overlapping the two negatives or positives.

The transformation process does not end with the negatives but with a book printed on a risograph, giving photographs a grainy texture.

Betwixted is a very strange yet very powerful word with many layers. It is not entirely a word, yet it describes everything these works and the book represent. Betwixt literally means between while the suffixed refers to manipulation. Between two negatives and positives, between analog and digital. Between multiple meanings of an image. Finally, between the male gaze (the original photographer), who strived for perfection for the sake of fantasy and enjoyment, and the female gaze – the artist who erased his with manipulation." Jelena Matić

Hand printed with support of Matrijaršija and Novi obrt in Belgrade.

Language: English, Serbian
Size: 27 x 18.5 cm, 168 pages
Binding: softcover
Publisher: Varikina, 2023