PHOTO 2024: Teva Cosic

Interview by Bianka Covic
Photography by Teva Cosic

Teva Cosic’s work draws on personal and cultural narratives around family, history, tradition, and mythology to consider ideas of stability in the face of uncertain futures.

Teva talks through the ideation and creation behind her works and interprets the PHOTO 2024 theme The Future Is Shaped by Those Who Can See It.

Congratulations on the New Photographers exhibition! Talk to us about the story, ideation and creation of your work?

Thank you!

So, this body of work was made during a six-week period visiting my grandmother in Sweden for the first time in five years and broadly explores the uncanny encounter of the familiar as it has been made strange through the separation of time. It was largely a process of wanting to document (in the loosest possible sense of the word) this return to place, most specifically my grandmother’s home and surrounds. I was interested in the way notions of temporality become condensed in the wake of a long absence, it’s as if we become hyperaware of our surroundings and our memories fold and collapse to create new openings. I used the camera as a way of processing these ruptures and making sense of my own place within broader narratives of familial belonging and cultural dislocation.

What does the PHOTO 2024 theme The Future Is Shaped by Those Who Can See It mean to you or how does it relate to your exhibited works?

I think this work deals a lot with how the past, present and future are entangled but also constantly in flux. I became interested in concepts of the uncanny/unhomely as well as the hauntological* in relation to experiences of absence and return. The past is a prominent spectre but equally so is the future. Questions concerning who/what gets remembered and how uncertainty (in the face of seemingly insurmountable catastrophes such as climate change) haunts the future and its stability underpin the more personal dimensions of the work. I draw a lot from my memories as a child living in Sweden as well the stories, folklore, and traditions common in Swedish culture which often feature magical beings such as witches, trolls, and fairy folk but also a return to the natural world (and care for it).

*The concept of hauntology was first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. It loosely deals with how lost futures come to haunt the present in the sense that notions of the ‘virtual’ also have real world effects.

What’s more important to you, the influence of people or the influence of place?

I don’t think these two are easily separated, they are both intrinsic to the work I make each in their own way!

When you’re not working, what do you enjoy doing?

Making images.. reading and being outside.

Lastly, what are you working on next and where can people follow you for more.

I am currently working on a kind of complementary sequel to this series but one based in Australia…

You can find me on Instagram @tevac or see more on my website tevacosic.com.

Teva Cosic PHOTO 2024 Events
01 March - 24 March

New Photographers 2024 Exhibition
Daine Singer
83 Weston Street, Brunswick
Wed – Fri, 12pm – 5pm
Sat, 12pm – 4pm