Exhibition Opening: Žarko Vijatović / Mother’s Camera 1990 – 1992

We are happy to announce that the Office for Photography will start its exhibition program in a new gallery at the same address:

 

ŽARKO VIJATOVIĆ

Mother’s Camera
1990. – 1992.

Opening and artist talk on Tuesday, 1 September 2015, at 7 p.m.

The exhibition is open until Monday, 21 September, from Monday to Friday, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., or by appointment (telephone, e-mail).

 

 

The Gallery Križić Roban (1999 – 2007) was opened for eight years at Čanićeva 6. After several years and numerous changes, a new exhibition space was created at the same address where the exhibitions produced and organized by the Office for Photography are going to be featured.

Our first exhibition presents Žarko Vijatović, a photographer who has been living and working in Paris for over two decades. The selection from the series Mother’s Camera consists of the photographs shot by a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera, used by the author’s mother. It is a simple box camera which, in the 1950s America, cost just a few dollars. Vijatović used the film format 120 (6×6 cm) for the series made between 1990 and 1992. The exhibited photographs were shot in Zagreb and Montrouge.

Mother’s photographs have functioned as akind of a trigger; they helped him to discover an idiosyncrasy which intrigued him and led him to question the expressive abilities of a device which consists only of a box, one lens, and one exposure.

If not only for the camera and film, the captured scenes refer to the past, but whose past – the artist’s or his mother’s? The late afternoon lights which in the flickering shadows break through to the surface of the table, the view from the window and the unusual perspectives of a reflection in the windowpane contribute to the estrangement of the scene; these elements are complemented by the seemingly strict compositional relationships based on geometry.

The outdated technology mediates just a portion of their story. The scenes connect the lines of sight – the mother’s from long ago and Žarko’s, more recently; they serve as a safe haven for the relationship about which we don’t learn much; they are traces of something “whose existence has somewhat preceded ours” (R. Barthes).

Thinking about the scenes witnessed by someone else, Vijatović positions his mother’s photographs as a starting point from which he embarks onto his further exploration of the medium.

 

Žarko Vijatović was born in 1952, in Washington, USA. He lives and works in Paris. He graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in 1980. Since 1994, he’s been a member of the French Maison des Artistes. He had a dozen solo exhibitions in Croatia and France, as well as a number of group exhibitions. He won the “Ilford” Award for Black and White Photography in 1992.

 

Žarko Vijatović
167 boulevard Sérurier
75019 Paris
+33618973011

zarko.v@free.fr

 

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The following exhibition:

 

HANA MILETIĆ

Coif Mode

Opening on 22 September 2015, at 7 p.m.

 

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