Underground Shelters, 2002-2004
color photographs
As much as shelters can create the illusion of safety, up to the same extent they allude to reasons for which the protection is needed. Considering the fact that usage of atomic shelters has been caused by devastation of wars or biological disasters, i.e. the consequences that these or similar can cause, the aspects of ideas on which the problems that I deal with were based, come from the dualism of the facts that shelters, providing certain kind of safety also witness that real safety does not actually exist; that safety that is being offered refers to the situations of general unsafe. At the same time observed as a synonym of protection and a symbolic picture of destroying, atomic shelters point to their own bipolarity and antagonism of their functionality, containing in that way the identity of spaces with authentic “underground” esthetic.
Ivan Petrović (Kruševac, 1973)
Graduated in 2002 on the Academy of Arts “Braca Karic”, photography department.
Selected solo exhibitions: Underground shelters, PIROSCHKArev, MQ-21, Vienna (2004)// TV or TV, Gallery of the Youth Centre, Belgrade (2004)// Images, Remont gallery (PUNKT, with Mirjana Stojadinović and Andrija Pavlović), Belgrade (2003)// Registry, April gatherings, Gallery of the Students Culture Centre, Belgrade (2002)// Vitak 1999, Gallery of the Students Culture Centre (with Petar Mirosavljević and Vukašin Nedeljković), Belgrade (2001)
Selected group exhibitions: It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe that it is, Banja Luka (2008)// Micro narratives; Musée d’art moderne, Saint Etienne (2008)// Land of Promises; Gallery Apollonia, Strasbourg (2007)// Actual Serbian photography, FOTOHOF gallery, Salzburg (2005)// Nus phenomenon, gallery Nova, Zagreb (2004)