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History can feel hard to comprehend while it’s happening and hard to remember when past. An exhibit of contemporary photography from the long-troubled nation of Serbia suggests potent ways art can help bridge the gap.
The show, at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s 937 Gallery, is titled “The Wind Got Up in the Night and Took Our Plans Away.” Curated by Miroslav Karić and Sladjana Petrović Varagić, and organized by Pittsburgh-based curator Rachel Klipa, it features work by 13 artists and artist collectives, with a focus on the nearly 35 years since the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Though a landlocked nation of only 7 million or so, Serbia is home to contrasts. “Salt and Light,” Ivan Petrovič’s series starkly documenting the people and landscapes of Serbia’s food-producing rural areas, abuts “Flashbacks,” the collective Belgrade Raw’s installation capturing slices of roiled city life. Thirty large color photos are quilted onto a huge vinyl banner fixed to the gallery wall but spilling onto the floor: street-level nightlife, urban detritus, orange rinds chewed and stuffed back into their cocktail glasses, one teary young woman comforting another. The statue of a long-necked dinosaur, shot from below, seems about to devour four fighter jets crossing a twilit sky in tight formation. A man casually points a revolver at a flower bed.
“Dirty Season,” a wall-mounted series by the Kamerades collective, interrogates political life in Serbia in the years after the brutal Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, but it feels especially pertinent in this fraught U.S. election year. Two dozen color photos hang in a constellation around a single, larger close-up of a hand whose index finger is emphatically extended, as in mid-oration. Most of the photos depict political spectacles staged in TV studios and sports arenas. Dark suits abound; faces are often obscured. Kamerades calls the series a “forensic retrospective,” and it’s one that communicates mostly disgust, if also a bit of amusement.
Some installations contemplate a longer sweep of history. In “I’m Going to Live a Hundred Years!,” Katarina Radović honors her grandmother, who uttered those words but didn’t quite make it. Poignant, snapshot-like photos (dentures in a bowl, folded cash hidden in a bra in a lingerie drawer) join artful assemblages and old family photos; the accompanying text is written as if by her grandmother, looking back at her long life from beyond the grave.
The collective Jednostavno rečeno (“Simply put”) offers an installation highlighted by an industrial-gray flat file whose five wide, shallow drawers contain hundreds of loose black and white prints chosen from an archive kept by a metallurgist at a now-shuttered auto plant. Soccer matches, parades, festivals, dinners, lots of beer bottles and cigarettes — it’s a time capsule of several decades in the life of one very specific community.
Two installations hark explicitly to Josip Tito, the war hero and communist revolutionary who was Yugoslavia’s president for nearly three decades. Goranka Matič’s “The Days of Pain and Pride” document the black-banded photos that appeared in shop windows — next to soccer uniforms, women’s shoes and loaves of bread — after his death, in 1980.
Yugoslavia itself lasted barely another decade. But history doesn’t just vanish. So it’s likely not happenstance that you’ll view the whole of “The Wind Got Up in the Night” to the soundtrack of the endless, automated clicking of the old-school 35 mm slide carousel in Vesna Pavlovič’s installation showing selections from Tito’s own archived travel photos – the Tower of Pisa! the Colosseum! — albeit projected upon a fluted Iron Curtain-gray curtain that renders them, like memory itself, only partly legible.
Yet some phenomena can seem to stand outside time. Aleksandrya Ajduković’s series “Beings From the Future” documents beings who look to be from the past. Each of the three color prints depicts a woman in a contemporary rural town whose inhabitants, according to the wall text, are “self-sustaining, ecologically conscious, ride bikes, are fit, wear traditional attire with floral motifs, and belong to the slow-fashion movement.” All three women are in middle age and wearing babushkas, each posing with her bike and a determined mien. Their lifestyle sounds hopeful, and I want to know more.
“The Wind Got Up in the Night” continues through Sun., March 17.
