Salon

Opening of the exhibition: Wednesday, November 11th 2009 at 7 P.M.

During two periods of time (1997–2003 and 2005–2008), in a number of parallel courses, emerges Ivan Petrovic’s body of photographs joined under the title Documents.

What binds these photographs into a new and complex whole is not the theme around which they originated, but above all: “… a need to present, by way of revising one’s own archive and its fresh patterning, a possibility for a more integral comprehension and interpretation of given circumstances and events; to perform a kind of inquiry procedure and to insert, into official statistics, something called personal drama…” (Petrovic).

Shaped as a whole from a number of heterogeneous series, which are numerically dominated by portraits, they are also bound by the fact that they appeared in Serbia, in the ambiances of the artist’s immediate surroundings, in social circumstances of general aggression and pressures and that as such, somewhat anticipating the precariousness of upcoming periods, are now obtaining a new place in reading and interpreting of contemporary public and social circumstances.

After ten years of following and recording situations and events, family and friends, there emerged several hundreds of photographs. By its large number and consistency, this body tends to give an integral picture of the artist’s surroundings in the given period, of the social circumstances and the life of students in Belgrade (mostly his acquaintances from Krusevac), of the life of his artist friends, including his two-and-a-half-month stay in Kosovo in 1999 during the NATO bombardment of FR Yugoslavia. The body also contains the photographs of confiscated objects that Petrovic took in the archive of the Municipal Misdemeanor Court in Krusevac, as well as the photographs of a duplicated photograph album found in Kosovo…

This archive of photographic material of sorts Petrovic uses as a resource, on the one hand, to provide an integral picture of his surroundings, which he has been observing for some years past. Besides, he always differently and afresh arranges them in space and groups them into “clusters” and new wholes, constructing in this way special micro-narratives, through which he reexamines the connection between the document and the narrative at the base of it.