Jenna Bliss

In her practice, which ranges from films, videos, and photographs to sculptural works, Jenna Bliss explores how perception, narrative, and the formation of value are shaped by economic and media structures. Bliss often begins with historical research, which she connects to current political and global contexts. Through the montage of documentary and staged material, constellations emerge in which fact and fiction overlap and narrative orders shift. Bliss focuses her attention on economic systems and their image production, in which value does not appear as inherent, but rather as an effect of representation and circulation.

In the series Drones, she draws on early aerial photographs taken from hot-air balloons to depict the country’s geographical landscape. Bliss shot the series using a Super 8 mm camera and black-and-white reversal film, which explains the negative images. She digitally reworked the film stills and transferred them back to film using LVT (Light Valve Technology) before finally making analogue silver gelatin prints. This elaborate process insists on a final image that is entirely physical, produced by light through a negative.

The images in the series were taken from the One World Observatory, an observation deck on the ​“Freedom Tower” in New York, which was built next to the deep reflecting pools created in memory of the World Trade Center. The film was shot with a handheld camera pointed downward, mimicking the movement of a drone. Bliss begins here with a seemingly detached, technologically mediated perspective and examines how perception is organized within media and political structures. Starting from the drone’s perspective, she reveals the extent to which this gaze is embedded in specific regimes of surveillance, military control, and the exercise of geopolitical power. The elevated gaze does not operate neutrally, but rather produces a specific form of abstraction through which space is transformed into a controllable, mappable, and potentially operational image.

In the works 5 Stock / Gangway (chat) and New Delivery / Gangway (chat), Bliss explores the intertwining of digital communication, logistical infrastructure, and workplace communication. Her starting point is chat histories, which she transforms into cinematic structures, thereby making them visible as part of the processes through which workflows and social interactions are organized. By isolating and restaging these seemingly banal fragments of communication, Bliss reveals algorithmically driven logics of efficiency and control.

In both series we see how perception is never neutral. The works reveal how subjectivity itself is shaped by technological, political and media structures that would otherwise remain invisible.

Drone I, 2021
Silver gelatin print
114,3 × 78,2 cm, framed 117,5 × 81,5 cm
Courtesy Collection of Attilia Fattori Franchini and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

Drone II, 2021
Silver gelatin print
114,3 × 78,2 cm, framed 117,5 × 81,5 cm

Drone III, 2021
Silver gelatin print
114,3 × 78,2 cm, framed 117,5 × 81,5 cm

5 Stock / Gangway (chat), 2017 & 2019
Super 8 mm film and video
1:39 min., Loop

New Delivery / Gangway (chat), 2017 & 2019
Super 8 mm film and video
1:39 min., Loop

All works Courtesy the artist and FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna