Today 30th April 2018 at 18h, opening of photography exhibition “The Subtle Eroticism of A Photographic Story” by Stanko Abadžić, Бартcелона gallery, Belgrade Design District

The Subtle Eroticism of A Photographic Story

Stanko Abadzic’s engagement in the medium of photography (taken up at the age of fifteen, pursued professionally since 1995) provides excellent evidence to the artistic, technical and technological possibilities of the photographic mode of expression. He achieves exceptional vividness and appeal through an authentic aesthetic dimension, visual clarity, legibility and powerful communicational dialogue. After the photographic collections based on city motifs (Prague, Paris, Berlin, Zagreb), he has focused his perception on the beauty and harmony of the female body. In Nudes, he has elevated it to the level of perfect visual form. There are three important aspects of his approach to the subject of the female nude: ordinary girls (not professional models) are posing for him, there is no styling or pronounced application of make-up, he makes no use of artificial lighting. In this personal, subjective photographic story he speaks about the ideal of beauty, about the enticing and the seductive in its natural intimacy and identity, about a woman’s nakedness which is not unseemly, about fanciful values, a subtle eroticism and a refined sensuality, but not in the manner of stereotypical photoshopped advertisements of populist media. As a separate fact he imposes a particular register of black and white tones, a treatment of daily light, and an atmosphere of refined sfumatos.

The nudes emanate, above all, a relation of light and shadow, taken over by photography from painting: skilful use of exclusively natural lighting which sheds soft light on the figures, fluid tonal shades and gradations of light, soft unfolding into space, insertion of shadows in the mild slopes of the body, tangibility of surface and the body’s almost polished smoothness, tectonics of the frame, artistic aestheticization focused on ambiance and minute details. He almost ascribes more importance to the invisible, to that which the camera has miraculously registered in the deep, impenetrable shadows.

Meticulousness and deliberation are invested in the frames of all photographs. He gives a great deal of thought to the right and genuine moment of activity in the frame: the singling out of details in the geometricized background of the photograph, the contrasting of light and dark parts, the affluence of optic effects, picturesque surfaces and textures, the emphasizing of gracile positions of the woman in intimate interiors or in nature (most often on a sand beach by the sea). He tackles the same problems as the painters: light, composition, fitting arrangement of space and the human figure in space (which he treats almost as a sculptor, with an exceptional feel for the moment and for details). His logic is to provoke tension, but we easily recognize a taste for tranquil intimate accords, for metaphysical peace and quiet. What a master he is at transforming the central motif of the female nude and the surrounding space into silence! We do not see the author, but we feel that he is also in the frame.

Abadžić’s line in new Croatian art photography is characterized by an almost scientific precision, fascination with beauty, and belief that photography both records and transforms reality. Nudes is one his most attractive collections. It is a project with a guiding line, one that encompasses an integral story, vibrancy and a firm viewpoint. And it evokes aesthetic judgement. Still, its ultimate goal is systematic construction of a distinct creative personality, and so the nudes are not only representations of the beauty and sensuality of the female body. They are, first and foremost, facts of the author’s distinct expressiveness, of the calm, strict and perfectionist visual aesthetics of black and white relations resolved only in the encounter of light and shadows. The glamorous impressionistic imagery affirms that his creative poetic quality ranks among the very finest in the medium of photography.

Branka Arh

Please note that the April 27th, at 19h, exhibition in TransformArt gallery featuring Szilvia Mucsy photography has been cancelled due to circumstances unrelated to the festival “Belgrade Photo Month” and the gallery.

This narrative is about the personal presence and the he lack of the presence. Reality and reflections, private diary and personal snapshots to preserve the moment by various of contemporary issue: Urban landscapes, private photography, cultural and social subjects…
A private documentary about different homes, impersonal hotel rooms, temporary accommodation in different European locations, as an inner observing, called HOME, and a visual diary of the outsite reality: the landscapes and everyday scenes as reflections into the experienced moment. Observation, the relation between reality and the inner world.

Szilvia Mucsy

Tonight 26th April 2018 at 19h, opening of photography exhibition “Tidal wave” by Sonja Žugić, Photo Point, Kraljevića Marka 21

A crest of ocean water resulting from tidal forces.

Tide is a term used to define the alternating rise and fall in sea level produced by the gravitational attraction of the moon and the sun.
The moon tries to pull at anything on the Earth to bring it closer but the Earth is able to hold everything – except the water around us and water that we are.
Each day, there are two high tides and two low tides. The high tides occur when the moon reaches the high point in the sky – lunar zenith.

These photos were created in Morocco, on the Atlantic coast, in a process of observing and following ocean breathing, luminescence, its mood and overflow, shaded by author thoughts and feelings.

Sonja Žugić, born in 1977 in Belgrade graduated from the department of Film and TV camera Academy of Arts in Belgrade. She received her PhD from the Department of Scene Design Interdisciplinary postgraduate studies in the University of Arts in Belgrade and specialized light design on Stanford University, USA.

Tonight 25th April 2018 at 19h, opening of “Connections”, exhibition of Contemporary Russian photography, Kvaka 22, Ruzveltova 39

Artists
Elena Anosova, Anna Block, Ikuru Kuwajima, Varvara Kuzmina, Dmitry Lookianov, Olga Matveeva, Ivan Petrokovich, Maria Pokrovskaya, Ekaterina Pryanichnikova, Igor Samolet, Danila Tkachenko
Curated by Olga Matveeva

Modern Russia is still dominated by vertical connections, both on mental level and in power structures. Changing of that vector is a labour-consuming process. Artwork reveals its conflict component through observation and dialogue.

One of the most poignant issues today is the search for one’s place in the intricate, sometimes turbulent, political and social world order.

Artists presented in the show are united by the close attention to the way how personal and social relationships are being transformed today and what consequences these changes bring to the individual and to society as a whole. The works of exhibitors are focusedon comprehension of horizontal personal and social connections, as well as breaks in them, by addressing the subjects of a dialogue, memory, time, transformation, compromise.

The artists aspire to get away from direct documentary photography, working with a variety of presentation forms extending boundaries of statements and perceptions.

Danila Tkachenko addresses performative practice in photography. Setting fire to ruined villages, he initiates a discourse on the world, not just a Russian process that would never be the same again.

Farewell to the past, – inevitably looks to the future. Dmitry Lookianov addresses the theme of bedroom suburbs of the city architectural design, studying sterile aesthetics of the new mode of life. The connections in time can be interpreted by the artists on deeply personal examples.

Ekaterina Pryanichnikova makes memory patterns and self-regulating social connections, using organic material in a borderline state of alive and inanimate nature.

Elena Anosova goes further with the concept of her studies: watching woman’s identity change and distortion in the closed institutions. In her work she reproduces women’s prisoners’ badges, deformed and changed by time.

The theme of escapism on different levels is revealed in the works of Igor Samolet, Ivan Petrokovich, Anna Block and Olga Matveeva. Artists are looking for ways to escape from the dominant social and political processes through corporality to nature, analyzing personal perception of the conventional borders of reality: intermediate phases of conscience and body, life and death, fact and fiction.

An appeal to classical Russian culture and historical figures initiates a discourse around links at the level of an archetype. Maria Pokrovskaya in her work “The Tradition of good taste” in a playful form makes a dialogue with consumer society, building her study into visual context of Russian classical painting and Ampir, Stalin era monumental art. Ikuru Kuwajima is a Japanese photographer who has been a Russian resident for several years. In his work “I, Oblomov” the author conceptualizes mental connections with Russia, through classical Russian literature. Varvara Kuzmina creates mythology around the figure of Jury Gagarin that became sacred in Russian conscience. The author studies the place of the cosmonaut’s tragic death, linking the recreated artefacts into a specific planet system.

Today 24th April 2018 at 12h, opening of photography exhibition “Geometry of nature”, Restoran Tri, Kosovska 51

The Geometry Workshop is a creative platform designed for all students at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture, where they have the opportunity to develop and express their creative inclinations through exploration of geometry, various forms and compositions, visually interpreting their works in different ways.

The Head of the Geometry Workshop is dr Biljana Jović, docent at the Faculty of Forestry, University of Belgrade.

Participants of Geometry Workshop explored the beauties of natural geometric patterns around as. They will through a visual approach introduce observers into the world of visible and invisible geometry of nature at this year’s exhibition at the Belgrade Photo Month Festival.

Tonight, 23rd april 2018 at 19h, exhibition opening of the photographies from the covers of YU Rock vinyls, gallery Pro3or, Koče Popovića 9

Between the 1960s and the early 1990s a vast array of vinyl were released by a great assortment of rock musicians, creating a powerful and influential music scene. The photographs and designs that packaged the single and LP releases from that period are still worthy of our attention and attract much interest. The plethora of vinyl releases from this period also provided us with a wide range of visual designs to cast our eyes over whilst enjoying the music, from the romantic, grotesque, provocative and censured, through to classical art photographs, the funny and even at times non inspirational art. Many are now recognised as design masterpieces and this retrospective aims to highlight a small part of that history.

The collectors’ passion for this period of vinyl releases is still visible today and the “A Long, Long Time Ago…” exhibition displays some of the rich aesthetics created in that period that still hold our attention in the present day.
The exhibition is a result of collaboration between Radio Belgrade’s Sound Archive and Belgrade Photo Month.

Cover Selection: Petar Janjatović
Curator: Ružica Vrhovac
Vinyl obtained by Radio Belgrade Sound Archive and courtesy of private collectors.
DJ Časna Sestra (DJ Nun) will be creating nostalgic feelings with a selection of pop, rock and new wave music.

Tonight, 23rd april 2018 at 19h, opening of “Insomnia” photography exhibition by Ruben van der Sleen, Kulturni centar GRAD, Braće Krsmanović 4

During his exchange studies in Finland (3rd year of the Art & Crossmedia Design course at the AKI) Ruben frequently found himself awake while the rest of mankind would be deeply asleep. He would take his camera out into the dark streets of Helsinki and started photographing the abandoned unseen world scarcely lit by streetlights. Darkness disturbed by the partial illumination of sodium-, mercury- and LED-lights creates a world that is rarely observed by most of us.

We have to go back all the way to 1933 when Brassaï published his pièce de résistance ‘Paris de Nuit’ to understand that photography and darkness are not the best of friends, but when combined in an intelligent and creative way, can result in utmost beauty. Brassaï looked at and photographed a city so well known by the whole world, in a way only few people had observed it: at night. It would become his most famous and sought after work and he earned his nickname “The Eye of Paris”, given to him by Henry Miller.

Ruben’s “Insomnia” is an ongoing project about darkness, light, sleeplessness and beauty that has so far been photographed in Helsinki, Lyon and Belgrade.

Ruben van der Sleen

Tonight, 21st April 2018 at 19h, opening of photography exhibition “To save you” by Mila Pejić, Meduza, Gospodar Jevremova 6

A series of intimate family photographs featuring my grandmother – a person I would like to forever encapsulate in my memories. Grandmother represents the only person in my family who I can entirely relate to – the way we dress, the way we live our lives… the things we love to enjoy. This series of photographs is open and I continue to create more of them on a daily basis, knowing some day each of them will represent a relic. A series about love and tenderness.

Today, 20th April 2018 at 13h, opening of photography exhibition “Portraits from the Novi Sad Photographic Studios”, curated by Ivana Jovanović Gudurić, Mala galerija Doma Vojske Srbije, Braće Jugovića 19

The exhibition is sampled of portrait photographies created in the early Novi Sad photographic studios, during the 19th century, which have been preserved in the depository of the City Museum of Novi Sad. The masters of photography from this period took numerous portraits of generations of men and women that resided in Novi Sad who used this opportunity to firmly uphold their own newly established position as members of civil class. These original photographies, displayed at the exhibition, offer an insight not only into technical and aesthetic development of portrait photography in the 19th century, but also into material and social culture of the time. The selected photographies are followed by the descriptions about the exciting lives and business ventures of the photographers, as well as the ads from the press which served as the means of promotion.

Tonight, 20th April 2018 at 19h, opening of photography exhibition “Imaginary journey- Spaces to inhabit”, by Eva Barton, Jorge Fabián Castillo and Jordi Vic, Dom kulture Studentski grad, Bulevar Zorana Djindjica 179

Photographers:
Eva Barton (Hungary)
Jorge Fabian Foto Castillo (Mexico)
Jordi Vic (Catalonia)

Traveling is not only a state of geographic mobility, it can also be an internal state, reflexive, an interior glance that has its own time and its own images that spring from the imaginary.

Photography can represent the world but not the imaginary. It’s here where artists situate themselves and gamble for photography as a means to get to that imaginary inexistent of the real – making it palpable, sensible and intimate with proposals.

Whether it is for a re-creation of broken sentiments where destiny is decisive to continue, or finalize, or a longing for the faded memories of a city that one felt and suffered, nostalgia for the memories that I would like to move in the distance and recover from that distance, or delve deeply into profound sentiments of the everyday and decide to travel inward in order to see myself and recognize between memory and the existence of time.

These are forms of moving with the knowledge that traveling is not only physical, but also interior and reflexive in order to arrive to the awareness of being sensible.

With the support of Embajada de México en Serbia & Collegium Hungaricum Belgrád