Recorded in Time and Space

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of The Spot Gallery, Jelena Pašić reflected on its activities and position within a broader context.

The black-and-white photograph is framed so that most of it is taken up by a high fence made of wooden slats. Our vantage point, just as that of the photographer who took the photo, is positioned street-side. In the left-hand corner, almost escaping the frame, a lady briskly walks by, while the left-hand section is occupied by a low-rise house front bearing a metal sign with the number 5, somewhat worn and damaged but still visible. On a wooden fence, approximately at eye level, there is a frame resembling an improvised advertising space, and in it, against the white of the inserted paper, there are clearly visible two words: LIFE and ART.

 

The photograph in question was taken by Željko Jerman, dated 1976, while the house featured in the photo is his family home on Voćarska Street in Zagreb, where he spent the first portion of his life and from where he ventured into his artistic career, initially as a self-taught photographer, and later as an artist expanding the photographic idiom through /by means of experimental and often radical procedures. The Group of Six Authors, to which Jerman belonged, gathered in front of this house during one of their walks around the city, while the house, apart from being an informal street gallery reduced to the exhibition frame attached to the fence, also occasionally served as the unofficial gathering place for a portion of the art scene of the time. The notions LIFE and ART could truly programmatically summarise the conceptually articulated practice of the Group of Six, who in the mid-1970s highlighted the all-encompassing intermingling of life and art, the inseparability of everyday life and artistic work, which only sometimes results in a physical object and which is certainly not exclusively reserved to institutional settings.

 

Four decades after the above-described photograph was taken, in autumn of 2015, the Spot Gallery opened its doors in a similar context, but in a completely different Zagreb neighbourhood – Črnomerec. Located in the courtyard of a family house, in a renovated space that was once the storage area of a crafts workshop, at the time of its founding, the Spot Gallery was the only gallery space in the city focused exclusively on the photographic medium within artistic practice. When, at the end of 2016, my professional journey brought me to Čanićeva Street no. 6, I had no idea that on the other side of the high metal fence of the family home, a kind of modern counterpart to the fence-gallery at Voćarska Street no. 5, my understanding of the photographic medium would begin to expand – a process without finality, fluid and elastic, in constant flux, and yielding results that (despite expectations) are often difficult to predict. Not unlike the process of taking photographs.

 

Preserving in its name the local heritage of the conceptual art practice of the 1970s through a direct reference to the magazine Spot, which, via its eleven issues published between 1972 and 1978, contributed to the development of critical and theoretical thinking around contemporary photography and innovative, progressive ways of treating the then already hundred-year-old medium, within its first few years of activity, the Spot Gallery became a small but dynamic nucleus dedicated to “expanded photography”[1]  – photography extending beyond the framework of established and expected forms of its use, interpretation and exhibition, but also photography that broadens discursive possibilities, creates and opens up new dialogues, new narratives, and new imaginaries.

 

In the course of the past decade, photographic works, presented in a successive series of exhibitions, each time transformed the Spot Gallery space into a new micro-entity employing the photographic lexicon to tell stories about memory and oblivion (Even When They Say You Can’t, You Always Can, Nives Milješić, 2017; Wiped Clean, Luka Pešun, 2024), archives (Duty to Document, Marko Tadić, 2017; Archive as a Memory Construct, Sandro Đukić, 2019; An Archive of the Unknown, Silvestar Kolbas, 2023), about everyday gestures (Meanwhile I’m Doing Exercise, Paulien Oltheten, 2017; Home Workouts, Andrea Palašti, 2018), (non)belonging (I Just Greet Back, Sandra Vitaljić, 2021) and transitions (Máj/My Stephanie Kiwitt, 2019; Sinking Ships, Jasenko Rasol, 2023) about nature and its representations (Zero Was in the Air, Davor Sanvincenti, 2018; Killing, Arranging, Walking, Petra Mrša, 2019; The Nature of Things, Maša Bajc, 2020; Birds, Katarina Ivanišin Kardum, 2024), but also about light – one of the fundamental building blocks of the photographic medium (Museum Light, Esther Mathis, 2018).[2]

 

“The word ‘photography’ comes from the Ancient Greek words photo – meaning ‘light’ and grapho – ‘I write’, ‘I draw’, and therefore, photography is drawing with light”, wrote Željko Jerman in one of his works, which in the form of an intervention (often textual, as in this case) “leave a trace” on photographic paper.[3] His works are both an experiment that transforms the technical limitations of the medium into entirely new visual arts systems, with completely unexpected expressive qualities, as well as a thought experiment, reflecting the author’s idiosyncratic philosophical poetics. This piece of Jerman’s, along with several others, is included in the online archive Forgotten Heritage,[4] the central result of a project realised as a collaboration between the Arton Foundation (Warsaw), the Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn), the LUCA School of Arts (Brussels) and the Office for Photography (Zagreb). The content of this online archive, originating from private archives of artists and institutional collections from Poland, Estonia, Belgium and Croatia, focuses on neo-avant-garde art from the (political, artistic and/or geographical) fringes of Europe. Jerman’s name inevitably found its way onto the list of the first twenty or so Croatian artists included in the database, which has since been significantly expanded, just as it inevitably found its way onto the pages of the magazine Fototxt, which the Office for Photography launched in 2019. By conscious coincidence, two fundamental concepts of Jerman’s practice – photography and text – are inscribed in the name of the magazine. Writing about his works in the third issue of the magazine, I stated that Jerman’s photography “steps beyond the habitual boundaries of ‘realism’, shifting its status as a mimetic ‘imprint of reality’ to the level of a material and visual object, thus radicalising the relationships between the objective (scene) and the subjective (experience).”[5]

 

As I rummage through my own archive from the period of working at the Office for Photography, new coincidences come to light: Jerman named his photography studio, located at Voćarska Street no. 5, Blow Up. The English term, signifying enlargement, refers to the standard process of obtaining positives from negative film using a magnifying device, but perhaps Jerman’s decision also included a reference to Michelangelo Antonioni’s feature film of the same name, made in 1966, only a few years prior to Jerman’s opening his photography studio. Frames from the film Blow-Up, Antonioni’s feature enjoying the status of an undisputed classic, were appropriated by Belgian artist Benjamin Verhoeven in order to explore and redefine the relationships between image and meaning, time and movement, original and copy, through his artistic research project Scanning Cinema. Verhoeven’s exhibition Un homme qui marche (sans tête) held in February 2018, was one of the first to mark the programming expansion of the Spot Gallery – both to photography-related and photography-based media, as well as to new programming units not merely to “accompany the exhibition”, but serve as planned situations for the articulation of photographic considerations in formats such as reading groups, circles, panels, and workshops.

 

Along with the continuous expansion of the programme, the Office for Photography and the Spot Gallery continued to expand their team,[6]  as well as their spatial reach, launching the Neighbourhood Lens, a multidisciplinary project centred on the neighbourhood of ​​Črnomerec, in 2019. The Neighbourhood Lens comes into being in numerous and diverse forms – from printed newsletters and thematic walks, exhibitions and workshops, to artistic interventions and sound recordings, underlining its mission of creating a kaleidoscopic archive that, in addition to gathering dynamic notes about the neighbourhood (then and now), encourages reflection on the relationship between urban space, community and memory. In this way, Črnomerec truly gets “recorded in time and space”, echoing the words Jerman wrote on a paper underneath a photographic self-portrait from 1979, simultaneously anticipating a future view, a future consciousness.

 

 

Jelena Pašić

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[1] Expanded Photography was also the title of the exhibition held at the Spot Gallery in three successive segments in the spring of 2018, showcasing, among other artists, the works by Željko Jerman.

[2] Here I mention only a portion of the exhibitions held at the Spot Gallery. The full documentation detailing its exhibition programme is available on the website Contemporary Croatian Photography: https://croatian-photography.com/category/galerija-spot/.

[3] The statement “I leave a trace” repeatedly found its place in Jerman’s works, summarising his artistic credo about the necessity of creation, action, and creative-critical reflection. Thus, in the text about this work, he states in continuation: “The first driver and simplest act of creating is the desire to give away a part of the lost self, to leave a trace.”

[4] The Forgotten Heritage online database is available at the link: https://www.forgottenheritage.eu.

[5] Jelena Pašić, “Radikalno nova. Konceptualni rasponi hrvatske fotografije”, Fototxt, no. 3, 2020, 13-14.

[6] Alongside Sandra Križić Roban as one of the founders of the association and the permanent figure of the Office for Photography, the working team over the years has consisted of Lana Lovrenčić, Karla Pudar, Nika Petković, Ena Grabar and the author of this text, while in recent years the programme has been led by Tena Starčević, Sara Mikelić and Ivana Završki. A number of associates and members of the association also continuously participate in the implementation of the programme and numerous activities of the association.