Affiance - an archaic English noun meaning “trust, faith, confidence,” and  “marriage contract or promise”.

The Croatian title Vjer.e.nica plays with the words „vjerenica“ which means fiancée (a woman engaged to be married) and „vjernica“ which means a woman who believes in God.

Through this exhibition, Jelena Vuković and Andrea Resner intertwine their practices, which have many connecting points. Jelena explores the embodiment of feminine energy and the divine through movement and poetry. Andrea explores symbols, esotericism and feminine nature through drawing, animation, video and spatial installation. By connecting their experiences and practices, the artists have created an exhibition that thematizes the archetype of the affiance, and the ways in which this archetype is crucial for healing the rift between the spiritual and material worlds.

Andrea Resner started working on the cycle presented here in 2015, with the work Tamed by a virgin, which touches on the theme and symbols related to the virgin archetype, and which will later be organically complemented and developed by the works created in 2024, in which the opening theme crystallizes in the idea of ​​the affiance archetype, researching the meaning and role of Mary Magdalene. Affiance is inspired by the writings of Margaret Starbird, who, while investigating the person and concept of Mary Magdalene as a metaphor for the feminine principle that the official Church tried to erase, also investigates the ways in which these teachings were transmitted, most often through art, using various symbols attributed to her. According to this theory, it is Mary Magdalene who represents the female principle that enables wholeness and escapes us from the cultural environment trapped in the patriarchal modality. This is best shown through the third work, Magdalena, in which these two principles become one. Mary Magdalene is thus referred to as the Bride, who, unlike the Mother, is symbolized by the red color, and who is depicted with an animalistic tone in the central work, the very one she has often been discredited for in history. In this work, she intertwines and transitions into the figures of a woman who is sensual and liberated, and finally into the third character - a woman who opens her heart. Roses, as a symbol that has been running through Andrea's works so far, are now deliberately depicted without thorns - because removing thorns means openness and allowing others to approach (but is also  a connection with the hidden church that used these symbols).

Jelena's works, on the other hand, often refer to the initiation that a woman must go through within her psyche in order to get to the place where she surrenders. In her work Mandala, on Jelena's native mountain, beautiful Durmitor, artists Miloš Vujanović, Milena Cvetković and Vuko Martinović created a mandala in the form of land art. This mandala, which in the grass of Durmitor represents the edelweiss plant, for Jelena becomes a psychological labyrinth through which she walks, following the thread of the relationship with her father - the earthly one and the heavenly one, from love in trauma to love that is free.

A spiral is a movement of a deep nature in us and in everything around us. It is the place where the invisible becomes visible and spirit - matter. Thus, in the work of Ada, Jelena drew a spiral on the Montenegrin Ada Bojana, and then placed her body on it, meditating and experiencing what it is like to be a spirit - which is also matter. Or, what is it like to be a body-soul in this world where we are taught to be torn between - either one or the other. What is the need of the body soul on earth? Community, tribe, contact, love. Spirit becomes Earth because of the touch. Therefore, this performance experiences the complete innocence of togetherness and imprints in the sand the inner desire to be natural, innocent, mentally naked - and not alone.

Jelena brings Dragana and Marko, a young couple who have been married for seven years, to the mysterious valley of her Durmitor. After a long meditation on what it means to become an affiance, one who surrenders herself to a man, Jelena asks them a beautiful, innocent question: How dare you? (to choose each other, to trust, to let go, to live love) and instructs them to feel the answer to this question in their bodies and experience it through intuitive movement. Jelena stands to the side, in the role of an observer. She sees two people whose movements reveal that in fact nothing else but that union would be natural - neither in spirit nor in body. There, in a safe valley where she has always known only love, two young, healthy people walk towards each other and she witnesses how it is actually so natural that none of those reasons - why he/she wouldn't believe and why he/she shouldn't - lose their meaning. The red circle that is on their bellies is a vision that appeared in Jelena's psyche - according to which this performance was made in the outside world, in matter, ritually and artistically confirming that outside of trauma, then when we own ourselves and within ourselves find our own anchor, like Marko and Dragana say at the end of the performance, in the video How dare you?, the only thing that remains is the essence of our life on earth - love.