History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Mark Twain

Who will I have been? It seems impossible to
perceive oneself as a historical subject. In a
lecture, Alexander Kluge mentions that it is the
grammatical form of the future perfect tense that
renders us politically minded and acting
subjects. Who will I have been? Where—and
how—will I have stood?

Even in the face of the anticipated future perfect tense, it remains impossible not to perceive the
present as universal. This becomes particularly clear in the context of fashion—a system of
constantly rewritten references that is continually reinventing itself and will therefore have
exhausted itself sooner than one might think. “Fashion is war,” writes Lisa Robertson—a
permanent battle for territory, visibility, belonging, and demarcation. Codes are constantly being
rewritten, thereby encoding new and different things over and over again. Language is continually
renewed and is therefore only spoken by those who design, establish, shape, and abolish it before
others can learn it. “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” writes Mark Twain. And perhaps
it is similar in fashion, as in art history. There is never a full circle; the cycle of references always
remains an open system.

What we see is a moment frozen in time. The early 2010s: a historic period that we have not yet
developed a sense of nostalgia for. Also frozen are the faces of the young women who have
ambitiously dressed themselves in clothes that, in the language of fashion, are already dated. The
young women pose tensely, wearing dresses chosen only for this one evening in their lives, the
prom. They can hardly know that the language of the present is not universal but transient. Who
will I have been? The future perfect tense is an impossible form, but the only one that can express
historical consciousness.
Each of the figures tries to express something extraordinary, to be their own kind of prom queen—
to find the unique outfit for the special day. Each one appears uniformed. They stand on their high
heels as if on small pedestals—shoes that are less for walking than for posing. The group photo
marks a threshold.

One in the school class is always the first with a new last name, one is the first to leave, one the first
to die. The way the students are portrayed here gives them the quality of the undead, wearing
costumes that express normativity. Their own kind of zombie-like eternity. The uncanny is usually
a haunting in what is actually a familiar space—it encompasses not only the concept of the
heimlich, the secret, but also that of the heimelig, the familiar. As in horror films of the same era,
some of the students appear blurred, as if possessed. “Horror is being trapped in someone else's
dream,” writes Gilles Deleuze. Whose dream is being dreamt here?

On this threshold between past and future appears the figure of the Swiss Guard—a guardian, a
gatekeeper, like the mythological ferryman Charon on the river to Hades. Unlike the accidentally
uniformed teenagers, he wears an actual uniform. He remains an outsider—appearing solely in his
function, not as a subject. The figure of the Swiss Guard, never in or out of fashion, is a McGuffin
in the composition. A McGuffin is a dramaturgical element that drives the narrative forward
without actually playing an important role in the plot. The McGuffin “lives” from projection—it is
charged by us, the viewers. There seems to be a general, maybe archaic, tendency to connect two
unconnected elements into a narrative. The McGuffin is a contrast that, in its quality of being a
disruptive element, holds everything together.

As in Rembrandt's “Night Watch,” in „Symmetry“ social groups are represented by their varying
degrees of disappearance and appearance in light and shadow. A generic space—the Hyatt Hotel—
becomes the setting for a monumental group photo, which only acquires a certain dramaticality
through the constellation of social hierarchies. The young people also engage in a kind of “night
watch”—on this night, they stand on the threshold of independence, which also means the
freedom to do things that are “not good for them.” None of them smile, their poses are stiff – they
are not yet as accustomed to being photographed as young people today – another detail that is
revealing the historical reference.

The painting “Study for Sex” shows us that innocence does not exist—neither in childhood,
adolescence, nor in so-called adulthood. It remains unclear whether the interaction between the
two deer is a caring or sexual act, or whether elements of both impulses are present. As viewers,
we feel almost caught in our voyeurism when we attribute an incestuous component to the work—
as if we ourselves were revealed in our indecent projection. Do animals do things that fall
exclusively into the realm of “pleasure” (or jouissance)—or does everything have an evolutionarily
organized motivation? Do animals have oral sex? While we find a deeply culturally interwoven
arrangement in the group picture, here, in the format of a poster with an animal motif, we see a
disturbing scene, and we do not know whether it really belongs only in the realm of the
animalistic. For the erotic component of breastfeeding is a taboo but at the same time omnipresent
part of our upbringing. “Weaning,” in turn, is also a threshold—the final cutting of the umbilical
cord.

The problem with forgetting is not that one forgets something, but that one remembers having
forgotten something. If one forgot that one had forgotten something, one would have no trouble.
Memory is blurred from the moment it forms—it is a precondition for not going insane in the face
of “remembering.” In “Symmetry” we are concerned with both the two-dimensional component of
this memory—based on a photograph—and the fleeting nature of the event. In „Study for Sex“ we
are confronted with an image that looks like we have already seen it before while its disturbance
surprises us on the second glance. A slightly distorted cliché. Both images do indeed represent an
event that is suggested to have happened „in real life“. One has the capacity to divide the world of
individuals into a “before” and an “after” while the other one rather takes place unnoticed. Both
paintings depict a world where one does not know whether one wants to belong to it.

- Olga Hohmann





Julija Zaharijević, Symmetry, 2025, oil on canvas, 310 x 230 cm


Julija Zaharijević, Study for Sex, 2026, oil on canvas, 85 x 70 cm