Image: Dragana Jurisic

A recent incident involving Dublin based artist Dragana Jurišić’s Instagram account makes all too clear the lack of control women have in representing their own bodies and the obfuscation surrounding the ways social media accounts are monitored, surveilled and censored.

On 10 May Dragana Jurišić’s Instagram account was removed without warning. Unable to log in, she reported her account as hacked and was sent an email informing her it had been disabled for not following their Terms of Use. She was told she wouldn’t be able to access any of her data from the last seven years using the platform.

One of the last photographs Dragana posted was a test print of a portrait of Caoimhe Lavelle from 100 Muses, which is part of My Own Unknown, Jurišić’s ongoing, multifaceted body of work combining fictional and real narratives to explore the hybrid nature of female identity. In 2015 Jurišić photographed 100 women for the project, which aimed to subvert and challenge the traditional relationship between the passive, nude, female muse and the male artist. She was amazed at the number of women who responded to her open call for participation, which ironically had been shared through social media: “I went into this project with a rationale that it is not possible to photograph that many women in Ireland, in a five week period, nude. The scars left from the rein of the Catholic Church are still visible; the 8th Amendment that denies women their bodily autonomy when pregnant is being put to referendum on 25 May, and if polling numbers are right it is going to be a close call.”

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