The article was originally published in the publication of the exhibition of Senka Trivunac and Sara Pantović: Everyday Banalities at Artget Gallery, Kulturni centar Beograda.
The experience of everyday is informed by the Zeitgeist that keeps one’s expectations and aspirations in check. Each decade or generation has generated a specific set of cultural codes, formulas and values that define certain period and cultural milieu. If anything, mass culture defines modern world and the first two decades of 21st century are characterised by abundance of everything; there is deluge of information, images, and products. For an average human being it is impossible to comprehend multitude and variety of ideas, knowledges and experiences that are being distributed through different communication platforms. It is impossible to imagine, let alone understand multitude of events, processes and concepts that are taking place at the same time. The economy of information is facing a paradox: the more there is, the bigger the confusion. It turned out that greater quantity of information does not make people smarter, more knowledgeable and perceptive.
Sara Pantović
Such abundance of material, that can easily create opaque cacophony, is above all present in the visual culture. It seems that people nowadays live in a huge network of visual representations. Real life situations are thus often perceived through mediated images and therefore objects and images in public space are so commonly organised in a way that is attractive for a photograph. It seems that in the world of appearances even the most banal everyday situations are always calculated for a camera.
Camera has the power to stylise situations, objects and ideas, and to make images popular and desirable in order to enhance the experience. Most of the images are nowadays made with a clear purpose, which is to represent something, whether to commercially exploit or to communicate ideas and ideologies. On the other hand there are photographs of everyday situations, so casual, ordinary and homely, that are often perceived as almost banal. The world dominated by visual representations is the phenomenon that photographers Senka Trivunac and Sara Pantović explore with visual means. Their works reflect on the everyday imagery that often has a purpose to tempt people to invest, buy, aspire and believe.
Senka Trivunac
Senka Trivunac is an artist using photography who constantly contemplates about how an image inhabits a space, and what is the relationship between the two in public sphere. In order to reflect on the outside world she makes seemingly intuitive snapshots of structures or situations that appear to be exceptionally ordinary and familiar. Her pictures show her obsession with the artificial nature of the world today in which images of things may seem more real than the things themself. She captures scenes, objects, images or events that are deliberately taken out of wider context, and isolates them to emphasize their ambiguous functions and meanings. Furthermore, her images do not contain fundamental feature of a photograph – the notion of time and place. On the contrary, they testify on the things that seem universal as well as ordinary, familiar, and almost banal. Images of masks, dolls, skeletons, decorations, human figures, signs and functional objects show the human desire to beautify and stylise, to make look things better than they actually appear.
Sara Pantović
On the other hand images of Sara Pantović are much more sober and unembellished. It is as if her photographs, being direct and pretty rough, represent the return to the real. She deliberately records the other side of stylised world of appearances: advertisement, public statements and decorations. Contradictions of what may seem visually attractive and what may seem as ugly and repulsive showcase the thin line between different aesthetics, between the perceptions of beauty and ugliness, which are inevitably products of cultural norms. Therefore, her works can pose a question where the rules and beauty ideals come from, and who is setting the standards of ordered and attractive environment? Nowadays many people were made to believe that the sterile urban environments are the symbol of order and prosperity, while more mundane surroundings show a sign of disparity. Her pictures showcase many sides of the same coin, the world that is often multifaceted, complex, absurd and banal.
© Miha Colner, January 2024
Senka Trivunac
Sara Pantović
Senka Trivunac