Vesna Pavlović

Mixtape 2018

MixTape explores Pavlović’s explores Pavlović’s personal documentary photography archives taken in Serbia during the 1990s, and offers a comprehensive look into an ‘aesthetic of resistance’ at the time of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The images convey an intimate view into a public sphere seen through the lens of a generation which defined a ‘geography of counter-public’ in Serbia during a decade of hardship. During a period of crisis, wars, hyper-inflation, and mass emigration, creating photographs was an act of citizenship and resistance. Different genres of documentary photography on display present a recollection of ‘networked’ memories of individual and collective moments of protest, in which music plays an integral part.

“Five large photographic stands interrupt the gallery space. Efficiently built using industrial wood, the fronts of the stands feature enlarged images of photocopied newspaper pages depicting The Smiths, Nirvana, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Sonic Youth, all culled from early nineties Serbian music coverage. Wall-like in stature and similar in appearance to advertising islands, the photo stands function as quasi-brutalist blockades, architecturally negotiating the viewer’s experience of space. These photographic stands commemorate the specific post-punk spirit of these musicians, generally characterized by a commitment to radically new approaches content and form, a refusal of distinctions between high and low culture, an imperative of constant change, and a preoccupation with alienation—all of which are anthemic themes in Pavlović’s photographs of a socially polemic, globally isolated nation.  Stylistically, Pavlović refers to this as an “aesthetic of resistance.” Audrey Mallow, Burnaway, exhibition review, Zeitgeist gallery, Nashville, 2018