May 4th – May 26th 2022
The Spot Gallery and the Office for Photography invite you to the opening of Darko Bavoljak and Bojan Mrđenović‘s exhibition. The opening will be held on Wednesday, 4th May, at 7 p.m., accompanied by a conversation with the authors and a guided tour of the exhibition (at 8 p.m.).
Future vs. Future
If we accept Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar’s notion that places are something we more commonly feel rather than comprehend, and that the places in question are often the murky realms of consciousness, that need not be clearly (or unambiguously) defined, then we may agree that places do not possess fixed identities. They are the object of different demands and expectations that we place before them – political, philosophical, aesthetic and otherwise, susceptible to intellectual “affronts” and defences. A place is, therefore, a space in which the process of remembering continues to activate the past as “something that is lived and acted, rather than represented”, according to H. Bergson. In preparing to write Ulysses, Joyce noted that “places remember events” so it follows that the notion of place is linked to the notion of time, which is especially applicable in the field of photography.
Two photographic series, both titled “Future” were taken twenty or so years apart. The first was created by Darko Bavoljak and the second by Bojan Mrđenović. They hold a special place in Croatian historiography, primarily because the second series has often been perceived as a sort of paraphrase of the first, while various apparent and important differences in their approaches and visual content were left unanalysed. Bavoljak’s “Future” was created during the war, as a reaction to documenting situations he was witnessing and reveals the artist’s aesthetic intent. Taking photographs in Pakrac and Lipik in Slavonia, Croatia, he observes the demolished buildings of the trading company Budućnost (Cro. future), the unique typography of which is reminiscent of the 1950s, the epoch of post-war rebuilding and the rise of consumer habits. The time when self-service stores become a symbolic place of sorts in which one was able to pick the “fruits” of transformational modernisation, intended for the new consumer market. Bavoljak focuses precisely on the name of the trading company that rose to prominence in the economic realm of popular desire, maintaining it in the spotlight and “capturing” the complex relations, interpreted from within the war-stricken zone in a different way today, than we had done during the early 1990s. This series also focuses on the political message directed at the period of post-war socialism, reduced to a mute echo of past decades that “fell silently”, unwanted and surrendered to destruction and subsequent decay.
Unlike Bavoljak’s, Mrđenović’s “Future” series was created over the course of several years, in an environment of the artist’s formative youth, developing on the ruins of the period of transition, which convinced most people that a “better tomorrow” and the material reality of socialism had been surpassed in favour of new economic indicators. The credibility of this, as we have seen, was not long-lived. The artist “allows” considerably more information into the frame compared to his older colleague, opting for the sort of archival approach that permits him to explore and activate the forgotten past, the instances of a failed, perhaps even outdated social utopia. His series is focused on history and an attempt to rewrite it, paving the way for interpretations of the past necessary in order to open up to potential futures. Mrđenović’s photographs of western Slavonian towns are discursive analytical constructs whose potential narrativity is aimed at (re)constructing and transferring knowledge and experiences. This exhibition is, therefore, conceived as a dialogue between two authors and two temporal contexts in which their works were created, between different approaches and artistic intents – as a means of contributing to the understanding and interpretation of the topic. To paraphrase Proust, our intention is not to find new landscapes, but rather new ways of looking.
Sandra Križić Roban
Darko Bavoljak (Zagreb, 1961) graduated in Cinematography from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. While still in his studies, he published photographs in magazines Polet, Studentski list, Svijet, Start and many other newspapers and publications of the time, as well as monographs, catalogues, books and professional publications. His works are found in private collections, as well as the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art and Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Museum of Fine Art in Split and the Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek. Stupid Antonio Presents (2006), Bare Island (2012), Urbi et Orbi (2013) and MMC (2020) stand out among Bavoljak’s cinematic works.
Bojan Mrđenović (Virovitica, 1987), earned a BA in art history and information sciences in Zagreb. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in 2012 and a Master’s in 2015 in Film and TV Cinematography from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Today he teaches art subjects at the same department. He works in film and photography.
Related events:
Guided tour and conversation with the authors
4. 5. 2022., 20.00, Gallery Spot
An organized excursion to Pakrac in collaboration with the Pakrac City Museum.
21. 5. 2022.
The exhibition is supported by City of Zagreb, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and Kultura Nova Foundation.
