International Museum Day 2023 / Svetislav Cvetković / Alone on the Street / Photography exhibition

EXHIBITION:
Svetislav Cvetković / Alone on the Street / Photography Exhibition / Opening reception: May 18 2023 at 7 p. m.

LECTURE:
Svetislav Cvetković / Basics and Principles of Street Photography / May 18, 2023 at 8 p. m. 

FOREWORD:
An observer and a random passerby / Mario Periša, PhD Asst. Prof. art.

A photographic image is always more than an image: it is a place of departure, a sublime gap between sensibility and cognition, a copy and reality, a memory and hope... G. Agamben

Genre and motive determination represent just a principle by which the selection of works for the exhibition is considered, within a wider field of interest and issues that the author Svetoslav Cvetković explores in his photographic work. Formally, coloquially and in a slang manner, we can talk about the street photography because these works belong dominantly to that area of photographic practice, both in terms of motif and metod of work. Also, as all the other forms of street practice , the photography as well, offers the possibility of non-standardized, informal and libertarian expression in which the possibilities of researching the wider concept of the photographic image in the artistic, sociological and psychological sense are opened up. These characteristics observed and upgraded through formal academic education, and following the aesthetic inspirations of the great masters of street photography ( what the history of art and photography inherits as a canon), form the continuity of the development of Svetoslav Cvetković's creative work in the medium of the photographic image. The author investigates geometric constructivity, exhausting the compositional possibilities of the photographic frame, playing with the peripheral elements of the image, but in the context of a "decisive moment" that governs the content of the image. So, apart from the artistic arrangements of visual elements, the author also deals with the issue of content in a narrative sense as well as with the issue of content based on the technology of photographic image production. Because the content of the image in his work is the grain of silver halide itself, or the thermal noise on the senzor, as well as other visual effects resulting from the intention of using certain parameters of the exposure triangle, depending on the method of production, digital or aanalog mode of performance. Within the semantic aspect, the author narrates his observation, usually witnessing a random event, a seemingly marginal phenomenon or a correlation between participants, random passers-by, in the space he finds. Sometimes the space itself goes beyond the event, the action and the happening, so the backdrop takes on the key area of interest for the author as well as the observer of his works. It can be said that the author explores compositional principles and the geometric construction of morphological elements in the frame, which is evident in the immediate observation of the visual layer. Another significant determinant is the semantic determination that questions those "places of departure…a copy and reality, memory and hope" and which determines the atmosphere in Sveto's photographs. Also, the author's collector's infatuation with equipment and the technical-technological possibilities of the equipment, expressed in the nature of either analog or digital media, which the author uses as a wide array of possibilities of each individual photographic device, is also significant and visible. In the end, the thing which ties everything into one homogenous whole is psychological and sociological reflection, which for the author represents the initial motive of the research but also the dominant result of his work. The symbolism, in Sveto's work, simply arouses interest in deeper consideration of the presented content, initiates emotional connections, compares personal and collective experiences of the individual and the community.

Sveto is the observer who standardizes his view of the world. He respects the standards left as a legacy by the great authors of street photography, but always upgrading the established foundations, with a new approach to the motif, some personal gesture, the philosophy of vision, or the experience of vision and learning. An observer who emotionally absorbs, emotionally colors black and white photographs.

The random passer-by in his work is the passer-by who could be any of us, who, due to the great causation of such coincidences, becomes a standard, that is, a representative of all those who, in the universal drum of random movements of life destinies, is pulled out like a lotto ball, that is, caught, locked- in, captured, torn from oblivion in that moment and place in which Sveto testified that it was a small moment, apparently insignificant, but which essentially reveals everything that photography is. For him, photography is, first and foremost, a witness of time, proof of time, proof of timelessness on the endless line of time that is measured in fractions of a second, in which the individual and the community exist in interaction with space and time.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:
Doctor of Arts Svetislav Cvetković was born in 1980 in Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he completed primary and secondary school. In 2004, he graduated with a degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Mostar in Široki Brijeg in the class of prof. Ante Kajić. At the same academy, he obtained his master's degree in 2006 at the post-graduate study of Ars Sacra under the guidance of professor Ante Kajić and the head of studies, professor Vasilij Josip Jordan. In 2017, he received his doctorate degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Široki Brijeg under the mentorship of professor Josip Alebić on the subject of Existentialism in European painting of the 20th century.

He exhibited at thirteen independent and over a hundred group exhibitions in the country and abroad. He is a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Bosnia and Herzegovina ULUBiH. He has won numerous national and international professional awards for painting, drawing and photography. He works as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Mostar in Široki Brijeg, where he is currently the acting dean.