28th Feb – 25th Mar, 2022
Photo: Ivan Buvinić
“The process of creating a series of works is like weaving or doing a jigsaw puzzle. Ideas always come to me in fragments, extending, complementing and mutating through a process of associations…”
Even though the works presented in the exhibition Spring Cleaning belong to different photographic series, what ties them together is a unique aesthetic inherent in young photographer Filip Milković’s visual language. Just as the exhibition title implies the discarding of objects that have become superfluous over time, the author picks out photographs from different series and exhibits them in a new space, creating new interrelations between them. The search for the possibilities of contextualisation and presentation of his work always leads him back to earlier series, which he observes as open-ended units, susceptible to different alterations and expansion. The starting point of his exploration is something familiar to him, yet by veering away from the initial idea at the same time expands the meaning of the photographs themselves.
The series entitled I haven’t been anywhere and I haven’t seen anything emerged as a mixture of the snapshot aesthetic and the use of a high-resolution camera mostly employed in studio and commercial photography. In the manner of diary entries, the author photographs events from his everyday life and creates portraits of people close to him, however, blending elements of staged situations with a spontaneous atmosphere produces peculiar scenes that serve the photographer to re-examine his own psychological states. A fascination with different textures, shapes and physical states sets the course for the exploration in the Pool series. The author explores the possibilities of a scanner device, whereby the scanning surface becomes a painter’s canvas of sorts and the basis for creating different compositions. At first glance, photographs created in this way resemble abstract forms, but observed more closely, they reveal various objects and organic matter in their makeup. In the process, the author’s focus of exploration is not on these constituent elements, but on the process of synthesis by which simple elements engender complex and abstract structures through mutual intertwining.
Tena Starčević
Filip Milković (1997) is a graduate student of photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. He has exhibited in several group exhibitions and two solo ones. He is the recipient of the 2021 Marina Viculin Award, conferred by photography association Organ Vida.
