Category Archives: Event

BPM 2020/1: Cruising for a Bruising – Dušan Kochol

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade

Brother, sometimes you get beaten up because you simply ask for it. Getting a testosterone thrill out of the emasculating pain and then wearing your marks proudly as war medals of phallic legion. Fed on the adoration all that you, my hero, can deliver is to bully yourself to unconsciousness, as the castrating eclipse occurs. The collection of black and blue maps is growing but the only road they show leads through your skin to the ugly side. Man up, shake off your ego erected goose bumps to make way for the pain to paint those bruises all over again.
www.dusankochol.com

With the support by the Embassy of Slovakia in Serbia

The exhibition will run until 22nd 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 – Fri / 14 – 19h
Sat – Sun / 12 – 15h

BPM 2020/1: Heroes – Karoliina Paatos

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade
Curated by David Pujadó

It is odd in general for people, even for people that know rodeo, that when they hear about gay rodeo they’re perplexed because they are like…
what does that mean?
Chuck
I think the rodeo in itself is all-inclusive. It’s called the gay rodeo but
obviously one doesn’t have to be gay to compete.
Phil
I think what makes gay rodeo so different is that we help each other.
We’re a family.
Drew

The American West has been the home of many countercultures. Gay rodeo is one of them. Still marginal and little known, even among the gay community, it contradicts the prevailing idea of the cowboy, which does not include different roles or sexual identities. It was born out of discrimination in the 1970s but has become a chosen family for many who do not feel at home in regular rodeos and whose families still do not accept their sexual identities. The carnivalistic drag culture is an essential part of the gay rodeo and everyone is allowed to take part in any sport regardless of their gender.

This exhibition has been organised through the essential support of Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Finnish Cultural Fundation & Arts Promotion Center Finland that supports artist mobility, by which Finnish artist Karoliina Paatos is able to participate in Belgrade Photo Month Festival.

http://www.karoliinapaatos.com/

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: New Talents/Novi Talenti 2020

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade

This is the 5th edition of our New Talents Contest, supported once again by Nikon Serbia, who have been with us since the 1st edition of the festival.

As with previous years, we have endeavoured to select a very eclectic jury team with 5 members: Paulina Anna Galanciak – President of the TIFF Collective Foundation, co-creator of the TIFF Festival, cultural animator, curator and photographer, Mikiko Kikuta – Artistic director of Shiogama Photography Festival in Miyagi and Setouchi International Photography Festival, Takamatsu in Japan and European Eyes on Japan/ Japan Today photography project and curator of Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, Director of exhibitions for Kanzan gallery in Tokyo, Francesc Fàbregues – Photographer, member of the Promotion Committee of the National Plan for Photography of the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya and Formentera Fotografica Festival Director, W.M.Hunt – Hunt is a champion of photography: a collector, curator and consultant. He teaches and lectures. He was on the board of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and has been head judge twice and finally, Branimir Karanović – Photographer and Professor of Photography.

This year, for the first time, we include in our awards list a special award for the best local project (Serbian) that will also form part of our exhibition. The jury had the very difficult task of selecting the best 3 projects and the best local project from the 141 proposals (50 more than the last edition) that met the conditions to be part of the contest. Almost 60% of proposals were sent by women and 40% by men, with applications arriving from 32 different countries. The countries with the highest amount of proposals were Serbia (30%), Russia (22%), Italy (10%) and Brazil (5%).

For years, photography has never ceased to be the closest medium for us to expressing opinions, capturing reality, commenting on it and even transforming it according to our own rules. It is often a tool for expressing emotions – anger, discord, frustration, hope. It also continues to be a fascinating element of recording reality and a kind of chronicle of memory. It is everywhere and can be anything. And what is interesting – due to this universalism it does not lose strength, on the contrary – it still gains it, it is constantly updating itself to the latest realities.

That is why competitions for young photographers are so fascinating. They let you see the power of photography that is constantly reborn. It is an incessant current that thrills those who want to express, show, remember, forget, emphasise. Be heard. Thanks to it, we can witness the stories portrayed in the images, and at the same time see what is currently important for young people. What they are busy with, what bothers them and, going further – how their culture affects their perception of reality. They are interested, which is very natural, in themselves and the time of change, maturing and entering adulthood in which they are immersed. It often relates to topics of sexuality, family, relationships, emotionality, memory. Many of them also look more broadly – at their society, politics, ecology, the lifestyle we undertake or the impact of technology on it; some of them wonder where we are going and what the future brings us.

It is fascinating to see how young people use photography to give strength to their own voice. How they take on this visual form to show us their opinion. How they want to be heard, appreciated, noticed. How they search and are not satisfied with the casual answers. How mature they are in their approach to art, but also to life in general. I am very grateful for the courage and strength they have. And for photography, which allows them to get away from tight and specific words and name everything that is close and important to them in a different way.

Paulina Anna Galanciak
President of the TIFF Collective Foundation,
co-creator of the TIFF Festival, cultural animator, curator and photographer

1ST PLACE
ЛЮБОВЬ РАКШИНА
Ljubov Rakšina born 25th March, 1996, in Samara, Russia.
Studied at the photo school of Kristina Syrchikova at Victoria Gallery.
The main idea behind the photography is based on the theme of privacy: a diary, projects on the person’s inner experiences, family stories, and feminist projects.
Lives and works in Samara.
rakschina.ru

2ND PLACE
MAXIME MATTHYS
Maxime Matthys (born 1995, Belgium) is a visual artist working and living between Rennes and Paris. He is developing an artistic practice using photography, performance, videography and installation. His work focuses on the way technologies are affecting our daily life and are shifting our perception of reality. While exploring new forms of narrative, he keeps documenting the important issues that are shaping our future.
His work has been multi-awarded and exhibited in France, Canada, Lithuania, Poland, Malaysia, Korea, United Kingdom, Indonesia, Spain and published in various magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, Libération, Fisheye Magazine, Polka Magazine, Médiapart, ArtInfo, etc.
His most recent work 2091: The Ministry of Privacy has won the Kaunas Photo Award in Lithuania and was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, February 2020.
maximematthys.com

3RD PLACE
КРИСТИНА СЕРГЕЕВА
My name is Kristina Sergeeva and I was born on 4/2/1996 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I have been creating photographs since my school years and from 2017 I have been photographing at a more professional level. I graduated from the Academy of Photography in 2019.
I am an independent artist and have participated in a number of group exhibitions in Russia. I have devoted most of my photographic work to working on individual projects based on memory, PTSD, archival photographs, childhood, and the study of space and place.
kristina-sergeeva.ru

BEST LOCAL PROJECT
NAĐA REPMAN
Nadja Repman was born on February 14th, 2002 in Sombor, Serbia, where she is currently graduating from high school. She is actively involved in photography and videography. She was the official photographer of the 27th Theater Marathon 2019 and the 2nd Sombor Film Fest. She has captured a large number of photographs at various concerts, festivals and workshops (including concerts of the Music School, Terminal fest, ecological workshops in nature Planeta, Krigla fest and the 40th Sombor half marathon). She is currently engaged as a freelance photographer at the Sombor National Theater. She is primarily focused on authorial projects in the field of diverse visual arts.
@nadja.repman

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: The First Serbian Ski Jumper – From Hand-made Slopes to the Winter Olympics – Vladimir Živojinović

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade

Curated by David Pujadó

For the past year I’ve been following the extraordinary story of Nikola Stevanović, a 15-year old boy who is convinced he will be the first Olympic ski jumper from Serbia. He and his dedicated father have sacrificed everything to fulfil this dream.
Building handmade tracks, training on makeshift slopes with no gove-rnment support, the two are pursuing the Olympic dream despite the enormous sacrifices.
The father and son have let me into their lives and allowed me to see not just their unique training, but their personal lives in Serbia and now in Slovenia also, where Nikola is enrolled in school and is now training on the mountains.
I intend to follow them in preparation for the 2022 Olympics and present this early work for your consideration.
www.vladimirzivojinovic.com

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: Astronaut – Matej Milenković

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade

The encounter with oneself is an inevitable act in any artistic creation. For a young person, that encounter is vague, uncertain and often elusive. Even during his studies at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade, Matej Milenković often searched for his own self in an attempt to understand, define and creatively present it. Through a system of trial and error, he came up with interesting and bold solutions that always revealed little, but suggested much more. Following the premise of the famous ancient poet Horace that the image is poetry without words, his photographs communicate on an associative, but never descriptive level. Most of the photographic series are accompanied by his poetic writings, which, along with the visual rhythm of the photographs, create the unity of image and word, sublimating a small narrative – something like a film sketch. Part of the exhibition is a video work for which the music was written by Aleksandar Ranđelović.

Matej also borrows fiction from film language, which he uses to talk about each of us in his series of photographs Astronaut, in search of the invisible, inaccessible, beyond the rational understanding of his own self, which tries to realise its existence within itself and the world around us. That endeavor in the beginning was doomed to failure because the realisation itself would mean the end. The end of the search, the question, the path. Isolated in a spacesuit, listening to his own breath, narrowed vision and limited movements, Astronaut moves in his own world, but is still deeply envious of everything that surrounds him, of everything that addresses him. Matej reduces this environment to two primary aspects – nature and faith. On the given and the culture. On what makes us human.

Curated by Ivana Tomanović
Professor, Academy of Arts, Novi Sad

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: Unspoken – Lorena Ros

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade

Unspoken brings together portraits and testimonies of women and men from Spain, the United States and Mexico, who have suffered sexual abuse during childhood by family members, trusted people, priests and respected members of their community. For six years, Lorena Ros maintained a close relationship with these individuals. Through photographs and recordings of their testimonies, she encouraged them to share in public their traumatic experiences. In addition to this, she portrayed the places where the survivors suffered their abuse.

According to a study of Adverse Childhood Events, in western societies, 25% of women and 13% of men have been victims of sexual abuse before reaching the age of 17. Child sexual abuse is a crime that knows no socio-economic or cultural boundaries. What people who have suffered abuse have in common is guilt and the conviction instilled in them by their abusers that what happened should be kept secret. Although abuse is frequent and widespread, talking about it was taboo until a few years ago. Even today, after the Me Too movement aroused in western societies a global wave of awareness against the sexual harassment and sexual assault of women, in the rest of the world the issue is still shrouded in shame and its victims remain silent, forced to face their trauma and pain over and over again.
Curated by Natasha Christia

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

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: From the photo cycle Calm Night – Marija Ćalić

May 8, 6 pm
Kuća Legata / Heritage House
Knez Mihailova 46, Belgrade

The foundation for the series Calm Night comes from the writings of Samuel Beckett, renowned for revealing the dark truths of human beings through the structure of sentence, rhythm and voice, as well as the scene settings. Through descriptions of the modern world and the individual, he emphasises the absurdity of general existence. This was the reason for my photographs to provide a transformative dimension, where that visible world turns into a realm that exists around us, but is invisible at first glance. Nature is transformed into a threat, spaces are not what they are intended for and they are not visited by those who are to be expected. The possibility of creating such images through his text and language were the inspiration for my photographic-collage procedures. The photographs are built as images of both a visible and imagined world. They are the parts of a wider cycle that is emerging and whose outcome cannot be predicted.

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: State Funeral, Funeral of One State – Imre Szabó

May 4, 7pm
Kvaka 22
Ruzvelltova 39, Beograd

“With the death of Josip Broz “Tito”, (born in Kumrovec in Austro-Hungary, now known as Croatia, on May 7th, 1892), in Ljubljana (Yugoslavia, today’s Slovenia) on May 4th, 1980, one country also died. A state that was as unnatural as many others, and which, by glorifying old values, was an extension of the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but which, as often happens, had a limited lifespan.
Yugoslavia represented the centre of cultures and religions, a meeting place, a crossroads of three different cultural and social entities. It was part of the two largest forces from the end of the last millennium, but eventually fell victim to the two most powerful forces of the 20th century. It was a battlefield, over and over again. Yugoslavia: the dream of the intellectual elite and the dream of a key figure of the 20th century who could not survive it.
Tito was a statesman and a strong defender of his ideals. He was relentless towards those he believed to be traitors. The carpet, under which he hid all his problems, had a name and it was called Goli Otok (Naked Island). He was one of the founding members of the Third Way. On his initiative and on the initiative of the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1961 a Non-Aligned Movement was born in Belgrade, together with Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia. He never accepted subordination to Stalin and his satellite states, but he also did not hesitate to attack the American fleet when necessary.
The state funeral of the autocrat and Marshall was the largest until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005. It was attended by four kings, thirty-one state presidents, six princes, twenty-two prime ministers and forty-seven foreign ministers from one hundred and twenty-eight different countries of the one hundred and fifty-four that made up the UN. What many believed would happen happened: At the time of the final sealing of his mausoleum, they left Yugoslavia inside… exactly 40+1 years ago.”
Imre Szabó, a photographer born in 1956 in Yugoslavia, is one of the most renowned photojournalists of his generation in the entire former Yugoslavia. It could be said that he was self-taught, although he never missed a single hour of photography at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade, but always only as an observer. He started working as a photo reporter in Ilustrovana Politika at the age of 23, and a year later when aged 24, Tito’s death occurred. Ilustrovana Politika did not accredit him as a reporter for the state funeral but he set out to cover Tito’s funeral on his own initiative. Without access to the best locations and considering the equipment available to him at the time, he did a great job for which he was later recognised, and a part of which is exhibited here and published in various publications. In 1989, which was another key year for Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall, he started working for the daily Politika newspaper and later as a photography editor for Nin magazin from 1995, when he also began his independent work. He also covered the war in the Balkans, mostly for the German magazine Stern. Among other things, he has had photos published in newspapers such as Focus, Spiegel, Le Monde, L’express, Time, Newsweek, Herald Tribune and Le Nouvelle Observateur.
He has participated in over 200 exhibitions, among which it is worth mentioning: Light and Shadows on the Balkans, Belgrade (2009), Bucharest (2010), Istanbul (2010) and Ankara (2010); participation in the exhibition Lessons from ’91, which included his works from the wars of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (2016 and 2017) in Zagreb, Belgrade, Berlin and Maribor; and recently a solo exhibition Devedesete (Nineties), where his war themed works were exhibited in Užice, Belgrade, Mokrin, Kragujevac, Niš, Paraćin, Valjevo and Maribor (Slovenia) as part of The Festival of Photography Maribor (2018 and 2019).
Curated by David Pujadó i Puigdomènech
https://www.imreszabo.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.
Don Quijote

BPM 2020/1: Don Quijote – Katarina Marčetić

April 23. 7pm
Radisson Collection Hotel, Old Mill Belgrade
Bulevar vojvode Mišića, Beograd
“In her series of photographs Don Quixote, Katarina Marčetić, through a documentary lens, captures the backstage space at the National Theater in Belgrade during the vivid performance of the famed ballet.
Delicate and subtle, these photographs convey their beauty through the multiplicity of prominent contrasting relationships, both formally through their elegant execution, and through the illustrative narrative they reveal.
The specificity of these relationships arises from the opposition of light and shadow, movement versus rest, the juxtaposition of symbolically opposite motifs such is performance (theatre) to real life, and finally, the illusion to reality. The all-encompassing mobility of silhouettes and figures seems to constantly strive to break through to the other side, regardless of whether it is a matter of scenery or reality.
Before us, Katarina Marčetić’s photographs reveal very vivid, compelling, almost phantasmal representations between truth and illusion.
They show a dynamic ambience imbued with dream-like qualities, while maintaining stability grounded in reality through documentary photography.”
Tijana Savatić
Exhibition by Бартcелона POP UP in collaboration with the Radisson Collection Old Mill Hotel and part of the Belgrade Photo Month Festival and With the support by the Embajada de España en Serbia
The exhibition will run until 18tn May, 2021.

BPM 2019: Mandić, Kukić, Peternek – Dimensions

April 11, 8PM
Dorćol Platz
Dobračina 59b, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia

Photo collective “3 Lenses”

Informal photo collective “3 Lenses” has existed for over 4 years. During this time the project “Travels” has been exhibited in 24 locations throughout Serbia.
“Dimensions” is a new exhibit, created specifically for Belgrade Photo Month. The focus of this project is the observation and questioning of reality, time and persistence.
This project consists of chosen photographs from the 1960’s until the present time, divided into three independent chapters, each curated by individual authors.

Tomislav Peternek is presenting part of his collection: “World of Imagination”, which was presented for the first time in Belgrade in 1972, during “Salon fotografije”.
The author used black and white film, to derive colour photos, separating specific shades of grey, and by doing so, he abstracts already abstract reality.

Goran Kukić is impressed by traces of time found in grooved stone boulders. Time shapes everything.

Igor Mandic is presenting a part of his collection “Pinpointed” which
sheds light on the weight and gravitational pull of non-material, distorted projection of real shape in its own shadow… with a goal of provoking the questioning of perception of reality.