TANJA LAŽETIĆ
Gasoline Stations, Again, 2016
Opening and artist talk on Monday, October 10 2016, at 19.00.
In the year 2010 I have photographed gasoline stations on the way from Ljubljana to Sarajevo 552 kilometers long, and wrote a book that I called Twentysix Gasoline Stations Only. I wanted to make something similar to Ed Ruscha, who in 1963 photographed gasoline stations from Los Angeles where he lived, to Oklahoma where he grew up, for his first and best known book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Ruscha described those gasoline stationsas the modern age monuments because they represent then budding automobile culture, while their architecture was an ode to concrete structures.For me returning to Sarajevo was the return to a place which has a special meaning in my family because my grandfather was born there. Travelling from station to station, to places where the traces of socialism, war and wild privatization are mixing; returning to Sarajevo was a journey to the center of the breakup of Yugoslavia, to the place of the collective trauma of our society. Bosnian gasoline stations are also the monuments itself. Their names speak of ethnicity, sometimes because of the name of the owner, and sometimes it may be identified through different terminology (”crpka” in Croatian and ”pump” in Serbian).
A lot of stations changed their owners in 2016 while some of them have been destroyed. The changes in recent years witness the wild privatization that is happening in this area. Gasoline stations that changed owners in six years or the ones that no longer exist I crossed out in red color.
Tanja Lažetić graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Ljubljana. She works in the fields of photography, video, installation, performance and artist’s books. She won numerous awards and her work has been featured in various group and solo exhibitions. In the last ten years, she published twenty artist’s books. Her books are included in The Photobook: A History, Volume III by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, published by Phaidon in 2014 and in VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS edited by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner, published by The MIT Press in 2013.
