All posts by belgradephotomonth

Waiting – Aleksandra Lekovic

Gallery RTS

20th April – 2nd May 2017

The photographs from the Belgrade’s homeless shelter capture the time and the space in which  the beneficiaries of different ages, psychical and physical conditions, are waiting for something. They are waiting to be put in a nursing home, waiting for the lunch time, coffee, a cigarette…waiting to go farther away. There’s no life course as we usually know it, because these people are not part of the system. Like some kind of visions, they float in the  space of the photographies, indifferent to /not aware of the beholding eye of the camera which confirms their absence from the value system that surrounds them.

Following the Light – Photo Assocation of Serbia

Gallery 73

20st April – 2nd April 2017.

FOLLOWING THE LIGHT is the Photo Association of Serbia’s traditional exhibition of awarded photographs in the previous year. The formal opening of this eleventh consecutive exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, 20 April, at 7 p.m. at Galerija ’73 (Požeška 83a, Banovo Brdo). The exhibition will remain open until 2 May 2017.

Belgrade Photo Month, Galerija ’73 and the Photo Association of Serbia will continue their successful cooperation by organizing a springtime, traditional FOLLOWING THE LIGHT photography  exhibition. FOLLOWING THE LIGHT is the Serbian Photo Association’s presentation of the best achievement of its foremost authors, an annual review of amateur photography aimed toward the affirmation of photography and its authors. The exhibits comprise all the photographs that have received awards in the course of 2016 at leading exhibitions in the country and abroad. On this occasion, the digital collection of PAS contemporary photographs has been expanded to include the new works of some 50 authors.

FOLLOWING THE LIGHT can safely be qualified as the exhibition of exhibitions in Serbia. It is a presentation of the best photographs of Serbian authors who have won gold, silver, and bronze
prizes at renowned first class competitions at home and at international competitions abroad,
primarily those under the patronage of FIAP (Fédération Internationale de Art Photographique). This year’s catalogue, as in former years, will have a list of works and will feature a reproduction of each of the exhibited authors. The exhibition at Galerija ’73 will also display one work of each author, with the aim of presenting to the public the current achievement of PAS members. The exhibited photographs are of high quality and fittingly arranged for the exhibition, in keeping with the practice of former years of presenting in the springtime term at Galerija ’73 the award-winning works of members of the Photo Association of Serbia.

FOLLOWING THE LIGHT have been held since 2007, with this year’s as the eleventh consecutive
exhibition.

The Good Wife – Deyan Clement

Belgrade University Library

19th April – 13th May 2017

 

The good wife, is comprehensive, multimedia project from 2015. started with series of self-portraits in which the author is questioning the role that woman has in the contemporary society, where this
‘contemporary’ is more like a linguistic curtain, that hides totally opposite show and intent from the
patriarchy, to save its positions and domination. With ironic approach, author uses his body and props, trying to trivialize the ideas of ‘the good wife’, playing with frequent stereotypes, from the typical ones, good mother, to flower fixer or the queen of the kitchen. His heroines are free from their identity; they are static, frozen and ‘nicely packed’ sculptures, perfect ornaments for your home. This question could be generalized to the point where we can ask ourselves one even more schizophrenic than this, why the bad is bad and the good is good, and what is criteria for that polarization. Or, if woman has a right to choose, how than she can’t have her own choice.How do we find the balance in those irreconcilable positions, the ones that the society give to me and the ones I choose myself, it is most important question in the second part of the work, where the focus is “in her eyes” , and asks us to look and see what it is that she is seeing.

Retraditionalization is more and more in everyday life, and in many bigger cultures than the one we live in, but what is interesting for Clement, is the phenomenon of mythologization and fiction in those traditions we learn about; in mainstream media we see a woman fighting against a woman who gave her right to be in mainstream media and fight for or against anything; very common conflict between what the lobbyist is saying and the way that he lives; terrifying statistic that each year is rising more and more in violence against woman, from the psychological one to the one with fatal outcome; all of that is motivation for this work to be created. For the author most important thing is making philosophical task, not the reason for debate or building up of your own side on this topic, but the reason to think about it, to question it, to analyze yourself and the world around you through his artistic idea.

East to East – Klavdij Sluban

Klavdij Sluban
Winner of the European Publishers’ Award of Photograpy (EPAP) 2009

EAST TO EAST : published by 6 European publishers:
-Actes Sud, France
-Dewi Lewis Publishing, England
-Braus Verlag, Germany
-Lunwerg Editores,Spain
-Peliti Associati Editore, Italy
-Apeiron Editions, Gteece

Text by Erri de Luca

Twenty years ago, a dividing wall was breached and the door to Eastern Europe thrown wide open. To talk of ‘the fall of the Berlin Wall’ is not strictly accurate: it didn’t fall down, there was no subsidence. Its time had passed and it was torn down. I have been a builder; for many years I have also knocked down walls – it’s good when they are no longer needed. To tear down a dividing wall is wonderful; to clear away the sentry post on a border which no longer exists. The one thing I love about new Europe is the abolition of internal borders. I love the word ‘union’. Walls have two sides and two purposes: one is to offer protection from the outside elements, theother to keep people in – to imprison those inside. The twentieth century has seen more imprisonment than any other period in the history of mankind. In my own country, Italy, people of my generation, the last revolutionary left-wing generation of the West, have been imprisoned more often than at any other time in the history of the country, shattering the record of incarceration set during the Fascist years. The walls of the twentieth century were built to confine people.

Klavdij Sluban comes from the segregated half of Europe, he is used to fences and to bars. He has even taught photography in prison. In this book he visits the East, an East whose people have been
set free, like monks released from an enclosed order. Twenty years ago, in Berlin, a dam was demolished. One autumn evening, a throng, a tidal wave of people poured towards the forbidden half of the divided city through the first breach in the wall. Just a few metres and they were reunited with their compatriots. That night Germany slowly began to emerge from the effects of a war that had been lost forty four years before.Twenty years ago the Eastern part of a world in conflict, a world then divided in two, broke down the barriers and broke ranks. Poland, Hungary, East Germany: Eastern Europe dismantled the locks and the bolts. In Romania, the Latin Slavs subjected their dictator and his wife to summary trial and quick execution by firing squad. Like his fellow countrymen Klavdij Sluban, who spent his childhood in Livold, Slovenia, belonged to Yugoslavia, a country which ended up being torn apart in the final decade of the century. As an aid convoy driver, I experienced the war of the southern Slavs: as soon as the shackles of union were removed they became free to destroy each other. I saw the flowering bushes of barbed wire, the multiplication of frontiers, the desecration of graveyards, the destruction of places of worship, the names expunged from registers one by one. From this region of all-consuming hatred the photographer emerges, his Leica slung over his shoulder and loaded with black and white film. He tells about those in the East, to those who hardly knew the East existed. For those who, like me, know that the day begins in the East, the photographer’s revelations upset the equilibrium, revealing the shadows that emanate from there. Even the snow is dark, the light a faded white, exiled to the surface. The photographer walks through the abandoned cities of the East. Where have all the inhabitants gone? Is anyone left hidden in the mist, is there some poor wretch on the run or with their back to the wall. The photographer presses on, in search of people, beyond Europe, advancing into Asia, Russia, Mongolia, China, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but he finds no areas of dense population. Everywhere it is the geography that dominates, making human beings insignificant. Lake Baikal, in Siberia, the deepest lake in the world and the richest in oxygen, is an unseeing eye to those on the passing train. To those who know of Asia as a continent teeming with billions of people the prophetic vision of an empty world is offered. It is peopled only by the one or two souls who are left after who knows what mass exodus or population disaster: the remaining few live on there without hope. The Hebrew word kèdem indicates both time past and the East. The journey of the photographer, rather than leading him to an East that is conceived as time past, opens a crack in the wall of time and takes him into the future. He visits the East as if he were a pilgrim consulting an oracle. From it he receives visions veiled in smoke and mist: the East is a defeated future, a time yet to come for humanity, stretched out and flexing, as if it were a tail, still wagging, if only feebly. The tail, as every butcher knows, is the hardest part to skin. And the future depicted here in photographic images is hard, hard to listen to. From the noisiest century of all, the greatest producer of mechanical clatter, we shall pass into a world of silence. The future will be accompanied by the silence of those who have been struck dumb. In these photographs, the use of black and white is like the fitting of a silencer to the barrel of a gun. The photographer is a marksman. The rumble of escalators, nuclear power stations, trains and urban landscapes breaks up into whispers. The photographer is homesick for the native snow of his childhood, the snow that used to blanket his corner of the world. But here it has become a white leprosy; it doesn’t coat the ground but eats away at it. Its silence is oppressive. Occasionally the photographer uses a fast exposure to capture a movement, a sudden rush. More often he uses a long exposure and a very small aperture, so that the image is suffused with silence. To give subjects stillness a longer exposure is required. Stillness is the state of grace of a messianic moment, not the thrill of a divine visitation, but the conclusion of a race. The trunks of four slender birches stand out from the wood, like sentries in white. They signal the land’s return to nature, free from human intervention, reclaimed by the wind. I am moved by the single historical flashback which appears in the book, the rush of the sailors across the square for the onslaught on the Winter Palace. The photographer wasn’t there, but he wanted to recreate the scene, and so he photographed a painting exhibited in a museum in St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad to those of us from the twentieth century. It is the only image of a mass of people in motion in the book and it comes from a painting from the beginning of the revolutionary era. Anyone with an imaginative ear can hear the crackle of the bullets and crunch of the trodden snow. The balance of power between the oppressors and the oppressed was changing throughout the world with the revolutions in the East. Ours was a century of insurgents. One photograph is a portrait of our times, the face of a woman with her lips parted to kiss
nothingness, caught in a mirror image. She is turning and is divided for ever. The whole of the East
looks in this way towards the West. Its speechless gaze is the mutest of the whole collection: it
offers and invites a greeting – and silences the onlooker.

Erri de Luca

Baggage – Luka Klikovac

Baggage

Luka Klikovac

In the cult film Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni, the main character, a fashion photographer, took candid photos of a loving couple in a deserted park. The woman who desperately tried to come into possession of negatives and her interest in the film itself urged him to scrutinize the scene. By gradually blowing it up, the classic black and white documentary photography became an imperfect, spoiled, granular structure, while a common, slightly idyllic scene became a bizarre one, because there was a hidden picture behind it – a murder scene. What hides behind – that is a question that can be connected to each photography. Born in a dark, mysterious box, photography has gained the status of a “mirror reflection” because of our century-long aspiration to capture the real picture of nature. In its imposed and ostensible reality, it leaves space for us for various interpretations, destructions and deconstructions, for creation of one or more situations and stories below the primary picture that was presented to us. A series of photographs and X-rays called Baggage represents the last part of the trilogy of Luka Klikovac. In the first part Memento, the author, through photos of sterile, hospital atmosphere of young people on the autopsy table, deal with the analysis of life, death, time, our pointless fight with it, as well as the photography itself which constantly reminds us of transience and end. On the contrary, in the Mirror, with images of the same people, but in coffins and with certain costumes and props, he focused on unfulfilled desires, fantasies and imposed ideals, false self-presentation in the society of continuous production and
consumption of technological images, in short, on what we strive for during our life, more or less, and what becomes totally irrelevant with the termination of life itself. The story continues and at the same time ends with the project Baggage, which is placed between the mentioned cycles and represents a potential reality. The same actors were shot at night in different exteriors and interiors of surreal, tense and creepy atmosphere. With cold, aloof glance, as if the last people on earth, they are shown with suitcases and bags anticipating an action that is yet to happen. Who are they? What or who are they waiting for? Where are they going? These are not the only questions that are imposed. Perhaps more important one is: What are they carrying in their baggage? Due to the presence of tension and film structure, and more than in previous two cycles, Luka Klikovac has taken the position of a film director, the one who has left nothing to chance, from selection of locations and appearance of protagonists, through lightning and shooting, to presentation in the gallery. At the same time, he went further by introducing enlightened X-rays that reveal the mystery of the contents of baggage itself to spectators. According to common understanding about photography, the negative or the film hides something because it gives us shapes of objects, people or situations, while the positive or the image itself is the one that reveals. Here we find the opposite. A photo or a positive is the one that hides, while the X-ray is the one that reveals the mystery of contents of suitcases and bags, thus introducing new situations and contents into stories. In this way, the problem of reality and authenticity of photography gets a new, atypical approach. Acting on the principle of a trigger and by displacing the classical perception of a spectator, Trilogy and therefore Baggage by Luka Klikovac are the criticism of irony, absurdity, bizarreness of the modern society, our perceptions of the world, time and reality which is intertwined with the analysis and a review of the photography itself and our own perception.

Jelena Matic, MA

Icons of Motions – Sabine Hauswirth

Radisson Blu Old Mill Hotel

17th April – 2nd May 2017

 

„Icons of Motion“ is the title of a series of photos of the contemporary Performance-Scene in Vienna and depicts cultural personalities on Vienna´s rooftops. The shots reveal the individuals setting the stage for themselves, allowing artistic icons to be created simultaneously. Just like the roof landscapes represent sign and signature with their silhouettes, the protagonist´s expressive faces and self-conscious composures reflect the creative elements of the city. Each building's construction and architecture is an idiosyncratic element in Vienna´s distinct silhouette, individual as the bodies of people. The roofs provide insight and outlook for the camera´s visual angle, presenting the individuals as a vital landmark. Belgrade, like Vienna, is a vivid and growing cultural Metropole, the art scenes are already in constant exchange. „Icons of Motion” was part of “Monat der Fotografie”, in Vienna, November 2016 – it will be a premier for the internationally renowned artist Sabine Hauswirth that her work can be seen in Belgrade.

Biography: Sabine Hauswirth, born 1963 in Vienna, is an international photographer, her works are represented and collected by museums and individuals alike. Her artistic portfolio includes multifaceted portraits of remarkable personalities. Among others, Sabine Hauswirth portrayed other artists such as David Bowie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Dennis Hopper, Christian Ludwig Attersee, Friederike Mayröcker, Harri Stojka, Jude Law, Hermann Nitsch, Nicholas Ofcarek or Christine Nöstlinger.

Sabine Hauswirth lives and works in Vienna. Read more at www.sabinehauswirth.com
Contact: Sabine Hauswirth|  Hauffgasse 27-1- 23 | 1110 Wien

E: office@sabinehauswirth.com | M: +43 664 103 84 67