Category Archives: Announcement

BPM 2020/1: Under the Light of the Sea – Espe Pons

May 9, 12 pm
Konak kneginje Ljubice
Sime Markovića 8, Belgrade

To look at the work of Espe Pons you have to look actively. There is no easy seduction by objects or faces, clothes or lighting. The locations appear empty. Architectural details are lost to time. The land does not have familiar landmarks. You are told the work is in memory of her grandfather’s younger brother who fought for the Republicans during the Civil War and died as a result. As a viewer, you have to fill in information and participate in the process. You are asked to remember.

Cynthia Young
Curator of the Robert Capa Archive at the
International Center of Photography, New York

Who knows if by intensifying the silence which lives in the image, one can manage to capture the screams of pain in the memory of those places. Who knows if the emotion of finding herself in these places, having carried out the research, can make the location speak, and if we can also perceive in the silent image the experience of scientific research on historical memory and at the same time aesthetic research.

Vicenç Altaió
Poet, essayist , art critic and ideas trafficker

Texts excerpts from the catalogue for the Sota la llum del mar (Under the Light of the Sea) exhibition at the Museu Palau Solterra, of the Vila Casas Foundation which took place between 18th July and 22nd November 2020).

This exhibition has been organised through the essential support of the Spanish Embassy in Serbia and the Institut Ramon Llull that supports artist mobility, by which Catalan artist Lorena Ros is able to participate in Belgrade Photo Month Festival.

http://espepons.com/

The exhibition will run until 24th May, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue/Thu: 10 – 17h
Fri: 10 – 18h
Sat: 10 – 14h

BPM 2020/1: Cornered – Miloš Nešić

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

Cornered is a photography performance, executed in Belgrade during the longest 84 hour curfew that lasted from 17/4/2020, 5 pm to 21/4/2020, 5 am. The artist has positioned himself in a painted corner, shooting a single self-portrait every hour on the hour, during the entire period of the 84 hour lockdown. The artist was leaving the studio after every shot and kept returning on an hourly basis.
Subject of this act are time, space and abolition of free will and personal choice. The corner represents the inability to freely move while the mind is being paralyzed, thus reducing one’s mental space. The artist is explicitly leaving everything else every hour to take the self-portrait, by this he is executing the order and by cramming himself into a corner as if being punished, thus becoming obedient.
Using time in extremely limited conditions, through monotonous repetition, Miloš is transforming social obedience and suffering into a tool to create a political element in order to raise more philosophical questions. Are force and humiliation justified for the purposes of control? Are isolation and solitary universal circumstances of human beings, among others? With this fundamental exsistencial investigation, Miloš goes through an experiment that becomes universal, consequently placing each individual in the same position.

The final result is 85 photographs and a video of length 1:37:08 and ratio 4:3.

Music: Tasos Stamou ©tasosstamou.com,
milosnesic.com

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: This Will Change Your Life Forever – Klaus Pichler

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

Klaus Pichler, 2015–2017
New age esotericism is only one of several ‘alternative’ belief systems which claim to have discovered their own (spiritual, political or pseudo-scientific) model of truth. Esotericism theories – no matter how speculative or irrational they may be – are slowly but surely making their way into the centre of mainstream society. They are not only a game played with the hopes of gullible or desperate people; they are also profitable business models that lie somewhere between marketing and promises of salvation.
Klaus Pichler wanted to know more: For a period of two years, Klaus Pichler immersed himself into the scene by pretending to be an esotericist fanatic. He joined online forums, attended esotericism fairs and gatherings, familiarised himself with relevant theories, ordered products and made use of services. This enabled him to gain an inside view of the irrational world of esotericism, filled with remote healing, aura sprays and unicorn essences. In the process, he witnessed a mixture of credulity, quackery and betrayal.
The result of Klaus Pichler’s approach is the series This Will Change Your Life Forever which consists of pictures of products, re-staging of images found on online forums and visualisations of esotericism theories.

This exhibition has been organised through the essential support of Austrijiski kulturni forum Beograd, that supports artist mobility, by which Austrian artist Klaus Pichler is able to participate in Belgrade Photo Month Festival.

https://klauspichler.net/

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Searching for Mr. X – Karsten Kronas

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

Is Mr. X the one who stole my mobile phone?
At least it was him who unexpectedly turned into a ghost:
Through the Dropbox-interface of my phone, I saw every photograph Mr. X took with the camera, saw him, his friends, Eritrean weddings, and a community, more detailed than the one I have seen before. And, I discovered a woman on one of his photos whom I photographed two weeks earlier than him.
After I received 256 images and some videos files, I set out searching for Mr. X in Tel Aviv, later also in Eritrea. It was a search that was never one for my stolen mobile phone. In Tel Aviv I found a home from a community of Orthodox Christians from Eritrea who do not see any future either in their home country, nor, for most of them, in Israel. In Eritrea I found the most sincere people ever. The search has long turned metaphorical.
The series combines my photographs with those of Mr. X. With panoptic images and concise details, it revolves around questions which also visually transform a specific inquiry into an odyssey; questions of identity, home and faith, questions about wandering around. I am not only asking Mr. X, but because of Mr. X.

This exhibition has been organised through the essential support of Goethe-Institut Belgrad that supports artist mobility, by which German artist Karsten Kronas is able to participate in Belgrade Photo Month Festival.

https://karstenkronas.com/

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Minbizia – Olatz Vázquez

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

Curated by David Pujadó

Olatz is a photographer, a journalist, a woman, born in 1994 in Bilbao. Journalist by trade and photographer by necessity.
From the beginning she has based her work on her body, her soul, the woman who hides within her skin.
Her self portraits have a subtle delicacy, but also contain a sensuality worthy of photographers such as Edward Weston, the Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe, the work of Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto and the simplicity and minimalism of Noel Oszvald.
Come 2020, her life and her work are knocked sideways from their natural flow and all that subtlety, delicacy, sensuality, simplicity and minimalism have been infused with an added hardness, a hardness that I can only imagine is like swallowing broken glass, something that could bring us closer to the work of the Norwegian Lene Marie Fossen. This work has a name, the first and last name being Cancer.

*Minbizia (Basque) – strong, intense pain; cancerWith the support by the Embassy of Spain in Serbia

www.olatzvazquez.com

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Gentle Vandalism – Miloš Tomić

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

I’m not a good photographer, but I notice scenes and moments all around me and I react without thinking – I photograph them.
More than photographing, I love chopping pictures, mostly photos from old magazines, turned now into paper collages.
Even more than photographing, I have been obsessively collecting old photographs for years.
Captured unusual situations, attractive, bizarre, photogenic faces, or a randomly recorded detail that should not have been in the picture.
Enchanted, I watched and piled those selected images for years and only recently, I started animating them.
I encouraged myself to destroy those images in order to make something new out of them.
Gentle Vandalism, so to speak.

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Within Cells Interlinked – Milan Marković

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

The topic of the interconnectedness between natural elements that are in the relation of correlation and causality has been present in my work, primarily as an examination of their duality. With this series of photographs however, I reject dualism for a state unity- where there is no longer any conflict because everything is complementary and comes together to form one new nature without conflicting sides. We are all linked in an eternal bond, which extends through all the things that have, and are still happening now, as well as all things that will, ahead of us. Not in war, but coming to harmony when coming together as complementary elements to make up the whole life cycle we know today.

At a point of unity, dualities cease to exist. Dual forces become complementary and work together for an unknown outcome that is exactly what nature wants it to be.
Every factor in the system of life is INTERLINKED.

INTERLINKED, we all and all together make complexity of Being,
INTERLINKED, inseparable from environment our lives are intertwined with one another.

The inspiration for the work came from the Within Cells Interlinked – Blade Runner 2049 test.

I can’t tell you how
I knew – but I did know that I had crossed
The border. Everything I loved was lost
But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: All Time is All Time – Ivan Blazhev

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

Dresden has had a long history as a capital and royal residence. At the end of WWII, in what history considers controversial bombing by the Allies, the city was devastated and the whole historic city center destroyed. After the war, it was reconstructed and restored to its original state.

My work is inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s book about the Dresden bombing, Slaughterhouse Five, and it’s themes about broken, non-linear time and fragility of memory. I see reflection of these themes in Dresden’s history of being rebuilt as an exact replica of what it used to be, thus from today’s perspective blurring the line of old and new, past and present, memory and the present. Using a digital pinhole camera to photograph the city, I create a parallel; problematising the medium itself and its authenticity, and directly revealing the paradoxicality of the new as old, thus purposefully emphasising the complex urban and architectural history of the city, completely destroyed, then reconstructed.

Instead of just showing the present, these photographs open a fissure to the past, the remains of a destroyed space, as living witnesses of the bombing. The photographs can be seen as memories and/or facts. I try to create photographs which capture the past in the present, as clues of parallel times and simultaneous events.

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…
It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another
one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

https://ivanblazhev.com/

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Antre/Antechamber/Antecâmara – Inês d´Orey

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

Curated by Ana Matos

Arvo Pärt’s violin and piano spawned, in 1978, Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), a melody for two instruments that gathers together simplicity, innocence and purity. It resembles an ascent, the coming together of the violin solo and the three piano notes; the composition becomes the sound of a guardian angel. In Pärt’s own words, he described the piece as returning home after being away. There are some images that bring us back to music, to the poetics of that supreme, universal and eternal art, because they touch us in our most intimate and hidden self. Inês d´Orey’s Antecâmara (Antechamber) takes us to that unspeakable world, where lexicon and symbols are of a different nature. They express the emptiness we feel in waiting, the search for our own angel like Pärt’s piano that, also as a mirror, can take us elsewhere, waiting in a suspended time and space. Occasionally the human presence indirectly becomes protagonist in these photos, the viewer is invited to wander through these narratives that are the composition of selected works from a number of different series by the artist, and where one can hear, at a distance, the lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes:

Oh I wish I could hear a nevermore
Saying life will be forever this way
The waiting is over
And in the spring I’ll hear
Someone calling out for me.

Ana Matos

This exhibition has been organised through the essential support of Camões, I.P that supports artist mobility, by which Portuguese artist Ines d’Orey is able to participate in Belgrade Photo Month Festival.

http://www.inesdorey.com/
http://salgadeiras.outsystemscloud.com/SiteSol/

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Made of Photos #2

May 8, 7 pm
Bioskop Balkan
Braće Jugovića 16, Belgrade

October 1878, we can imagine a gentlemen’s club, a dimly lit room full of cigar and pipe smoke, a heated discussion can be heard that ends in a bet… when a horse is galloping… are the four hooves off the ground?

Leland Stanford, an American industrialist, and politician who also had an interest in breeding and racing horses, wanted to provide evidence of this theory and enlisted British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to shoot 12 photos of a horse in full gallop, a perfect sequence of the movement of the horse body. Leland Stanford won the bet as the photos showed that all four hooves were off the ground.

This extravagant bet in itself didn’t change the story of science, art or entertainment, but the resulting photos of that bet somehow mirrored what was also starting on the other side of the ocean in Europe. At this time Étienne-Jules Marey in France and Ottomar Anschütz in Germany were working on similar ideas and one year later the zoogyroscope appeared, an instrument for displaying moving pictures.

Nowadays, the possibilities are almost unlimited with what we can do with photos and moving images and who knows what technology will be available in the future. One thing we can be sure of is that artists will be squeezing all the possibilities out of it and demanding new ones.

Made of Photos #2 is comprised of a series of works in which photographers have experimented with the video format in order to present their photography work.

The second series includes projects by:
Grebo Gray – Michael J Sheehy, Judas Hour (Srbija/Serbia+UK)
Hélène Veilleux – Lava Tubes (Francuska/France)
Ivan Blazhev – All Time is all Time (Severna Makedonija/North Macedonia)
Jakub Wawrzak – Oasis (Poljska/Poland)
Miloš Nešić – Sateran u ćošak (Srbija/Serbia)
Momen Khaled Malkawi – 7 Mountains in Search of Home (Jordan)
Sylvain Granjon – Blakol (Francuska/France)

The exhibition will run until 3rd June, 2021

IMPORTANT:
Please note that due to the Covid-19 situation nobody can enter the Gallery without wearing a mask as required by the Rep of Serbia regulations.

Visiting hours:
Tue – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h