Ana Peraica

Ana Peraica (born 1972) is a media theorist and curator from Croatia. Her writings, most of which are copyleft, have been translated into many languages English, German, French, Bulgarian, and Polish. She teaches at the University of Rijeka.

Peraica was born into a family of photographers who were part of the famous anti-communist intervention that created the Red Peristyle on in the main square of the Diocletian's Palace in Split. Her family are from Split and have been living there for generations. She was the daughter of portrait photographer Dražen Peraica and the granddaughter of the photographer Antonio Perajica and is the niece of USA politician Tony Peraica.

Josip Broz Tito, Bishop Alojzije Stepinac and Antonio Perajica

In 2009 she had shown movies that were hidden from the communist government censorship in the family's antique basement. They were recorded by her grandfather Antonio Perajica who was a Commissar of Film and Photography of the former communist Yugoslavia. The work when collated amounted to nine 16mm edited tapes, running for a total length of 45 minutes, that had never shown to the public before. They came to the attention of the media and they were one of the lengthier films that were filmed during World War II. They contained an image of Bishop Alojzije Stepinac and Josip Broz Tito appearing together. The meeting of these two was erased from other visual documents by the Yugoslav communist government. The film gained media attention and filled double pages in all Croatian daily newspapers in the middle of the election period in Croatia (a society still being divided and influenced by the World War II history).

Education

Peraica graduated in Art history and Philosophy at the University of Zagreb, continuing with a post-academic program in the theory department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, PhD Studies at ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Theory and Interpretation), University of Amsterdam. She defended her doctorate thesis entitled Photography as the Evidence at the International Course of Philosophy and Modernity, University of Rijeka. She was awarded UNESCO-IFPC and BKVB funds.

Work

Peraica's writings were distributed online via mailing lists Nettime and Syndicated back in the 90s. Her work in media theory and criticism is characterised by her specific background of post-socialism (Gray, 2004 and Gray 2007), focusing on economic differences among Post-modern and the Post-socialist art movement. She finds them crucial even in cultural production, as without a free market of ideas and copyright laws authorship appears different. Most of these are seen as a turning point in analysis (Kolesnik, 2006; Irwin, 2007, Sandomirskaya, 2007). These are formulated in earlier texts of Anonymous artist, nameless hero, unknown history (IRWIN, East Art Map, Afterimage/MIT Press, 2006) and Corruption of the Grand Narrative of Arts

In her later writings she focuses mostly on photography. Her works are exemplary in the field of authorship and copyright. They are not only limited to post-socialism, but generally criticise art history as a discipline. She feels art history writings barely introduce Modernist demands into the interpretation of the very works of the Modern. She used photography as a medium on a mere level of illustration replacing original artworks with the photographs. Some crucial examples of this are institutionalisation of photographs instead of the original artworks as Alfred Stieglitz photo of R. Mutt's (Marcel Duchamp) Fountain, Alberto Korda's Che Guevarra, but also Zvonimir Buljevic's Red Peristyle.

See also

• Croatia
• Titoism and Totalitarianism
• Wikipedia's bias towards Dictator Josip Broz Tito and Communist Yugoslavia

Books

• Ana Peraica (ed.): Victims Symptom (Institute for Networked cultures, Amsterdam, 2009.
• Grzinic and Reitsamer (eds): Worlds of Feminism Queer and Networking Conditions, Loecker Verlaag, Vienna, 2008, ISBN 978-3-85409-472-2
• Irwin (eds): East Art Map, Afterall/MIT Press, London/New York, 2006, ISBN 978-1-84638-022-8. ISBN 1-84638-022-7
• Ana Peraica (ed.): Žena na Raskrižju Ideologija, HULU, Split, 2007, ISBN 978-953-96831-7-5

Notes

• Chris Hables Gray: Postmodern War at Peak Empire, Science as Culture, Volume 16, Issue 2 June 2007: 109 - 128
• Ljiljana Kolešnik Irwinova Galaksija, Kvartal 3/4, 12. 2006, 43-44

External links

• Peraica snimku Tita sa Stepincem skrivao od cenzora, Slobodna Dalmacija daily, 22.05.2009
• Tajna obitelji Perajica s Peristila: kako je otkrivena zaedniča snimka Tita i Stepinca, Jutarnji list daily, 24.05.2009

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Ana Peraica Croatia Rijeka Spilt Antonio Perajica Josip Broz Tito Dictator Josip Broz Tito Bishop Alojzije Stepinac Red Peristyle Split Dražen Peraica Croatia Josip Broz Tito