Sofija Crnjanski and Martina Petrović

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April 20th – May 6th

PHOTOgeoGRAPHY

“A Light Room” is a joint venture by Martina Petrović and Sofija Crnjanski that was developed over the course of six months. It was conceived as a dialogue that the two artists were having while residing on two different locations – Belgrade and Lisbon. Namely, by treating a photograph as a thin slice of space and time which allows us to ‘tweak’ reality, deny continuity or build new connections, the artists constituted a particular photographic dialogue. When one of them would send over a series of photographs, the other would inspired by it respond, and thus trigger a starting point for the next response.

In this way, the artists questioned the limits of photography and its ability to reproduce reality, which is always narrower but more dramatic than our ‘natural’ view. The following questions come to mind: How important is the fact that the photographs were taken in two separate places; and is there an aesthetical as well as an emotional unity created between the ‘photo-responses’ which surpasses the geographical reality and forms a new ‘photo-geographical’ space which spreads over the “lightroom”. As a result of this process, four separate thematic sections are set apart, onto which their newly-created universe could be divided – much alike four parts of the world:

Light burden. A ‘light burden’ tells us about ‘photographic force’ and is best described by an excerpt from the book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes: “The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed […]“.

Bad manners. This part includes everything that in a normative sense has not been named and thus cannot be categorised, which is why it is called ‘bad manners’.

Somewhere. A particular space where a photograph encounters the voids of our mental images, notions of the past and present.

Endless wandering. This implies that wandering is an inseparable part of outlining every space – the one in us and the one around us. This section will be shown in the City Museum of Belgrade, as part of the exhibition “Actopolis”.

Text: Sara Radojković
Translation: Isidora Krstić