In the midst of events

More than 50 years of photography Goranke Matić they are with us, among us, before our eyes. We have seen them so many times that they have become indistinguishable with our memories: they have become our memories. To that extent, the exhibition "Memory and Hope" gives us the opportunity to step away from ourselves and, as if seeing them for the first time, look at Goranka's photographs again.

photo: Goranka Matić

Thematic photo exhibition Goranke Matić "Memory and Hope" is an immediate artistic and political reaction to what is happening here and now: the citizens' rebellion against the authoritarian regime of Aleksandar Vučić. Curators Una Popović and Mia David have chosen Goranka Matić's photographic testimonies from all the major demonstrations against the regime of Slobodan Milošević, from March 9, 1991, to October 5, 2000, and offered an overview of the history of civil uprisings, analogies, meanings, as well as a reminder that winning freedom is a long and arduous process. However, the female curators offered another, no less important perspective: great artists are reliable witnesses of their time not because they transmit facts, but because they give meaning to facts with their art. When Goranka Matić captures reality through the eye of the camera, she interprets that reality in the very act of taking photographs. She is always among the protesters, her camera is focused on the faces who are there for freedom, or she is focused on their bodies that are unnaturally close to each other in order to gather the energy of the crowd, as in any common struggle. The great photographer captures that atmosphere. But when she takes photos of Slobodan Milošević at his presidential inauguration, while the crowd stirs around her - in her photos it's as if we hear the roar of the crowd, as if we hear that whistle of Jelena Šantić who, in front of people, isolated, walks with her hand raised in which she holds her shoe - she does it from a distance because, first of all, she can't get close (she's not a court photographer), and the ruler, his lovely wife with a flower in her hair and a court servant, they seem like dolls, distant, stiff, inappropriate. Goranka did not set anyone up for a picture, but offered what can be seen from the place where she is standing. What can be said, can be seen from the position she chose as a witness, as a participant, as an artist and as a citizen. The very proximity and the very distance are already interpretations precisely because of the place it occupies. The exhibition in the "Novembar" gallery gives us the opportunity to move away from our own conviction that we know the work of this great photographer - because we lived, matured and grew old with her photos - and patiently, once again, look at what is in those photos in addition to what we know that it is theirs.

photo: Goranka Matić

GIRL WITH A BICYCLE

In one of the most impressive large-format photos, the right side of the scene is occupied by a girl on a bicycle facing the camera, but not looking at the camera, while on the left side, a police cordon can be seen also facing the camera, but the faces of the police officers are not clear. The contrast is clear. It is precisely on the contrast that the captured scene rests. But the contrast is deeper and does not rely only on the double plane: the girl in the first plane, the cordon in the second plane. The girl is relaxed, with a calm face and a calm look, she is dressed lightly, her hands are outstretched resting on the dark governor, and her whole appearance shows not only that she belongs to a certain world, but that she carries the world within her. If it wasn't like that, she wouldn't be in the place she is (she could ride a bike on roads that are a bit more passable). She carries herself in such a way that leaves no doubt that she knows what she is there for. Opposite her, the policemen are huddled together and somehow clumsily stacked, piled up, in clumsy equipment dominated by bulletproof vests and helmets. It cannot be said that they are tense. They also know why they're there (or, um... maybe they don't know; they're not there because of the menacing threat that, in the form of a girl with a bicycle, attacks them, the legal and political order?!). And they, undoubtedly, carry some kind of worlds within them, but we don't know anything about those worlds because the policemen are not unified. Of course, every police cordon is standardized, uniform, impersonal. That is the meaning of the cordon. The cordon is a wall, and we cannot see the bricks from the wall. But here the idea of ​​the cordon is lost before the image of the cordon and the girl with the bicycle: the cordon is limp because it cannot be taut, the cordon is in a place where it does not belong, it is redundant and meaningless, and the great photographer immediately, with one click, printed the text of the interpretation.

photo: Goranka Matić

SCULPTURE

The famous photograph of Goranka Matić, in which we see a cluster of people at the bust of Knez Mihailo in the center of Belgrade, on March 9, 1991, at the first large demonstrations against the regime of Slobodan Milošević, can easily be called a masterpiece. The photographer approached as close as possible to the monument surrounded by people and, from a sharp angle, clicked from the bottom angle. At the top are the rider and the horse, but the balance of the composition is provided by the people studded on the pedestal, and the rider and the horse appear as if they are standing on a pyramidal structure made of human bodies, as if they are on the shoulders of those below them. In front of that photo, one cannot avoid associations with the famous canvases of Pieter Bruegel, on which the crowd boils, or with Botticelli's depiction of Dante's "Inferno", on which bodies thrown out of balance are swirling.

ANALOGIES

photo: Goranka Matić

Every now and then we come across famous faces in the photos of Goranka Matić, and again, those faces do not simply mean familiarity, but they are there for context. Here, famous faces do not hide behind their recognition, but incorporate their characters into the event. The mature and calm face of Radet Šerbedžija, the focused face of Mirjana Karanović behind sunglasses at the anti-war protests in 1992, Cane and Milan Mladenović before the truck is about to leave with the song "Mir brate mir", but also Patriarch Pavle who (to everyone's surprise) sided with the Milošević regime and called on the students to disperse "for the common good" (was it?). Later, from the protest in September 2000, we see Teofil who, seeing Goranka Matić's pointed camera, tells Olja: "Look who's watching us." She turns around and there is a wonderful photo.

photo: Goranka Matić

There are, of course, analogies. The setting of Una Popović and Mia David is determined by the context. As in all those years under Milosevic's regime, citizens are still fighting against the criminal regime. The idea is to show the idea of ​​fighting, to see the similarities. But analogies are, without exception, deceptive, and when it comes to this level of exhibition, one needs to be careful. What we see is almost the same. Only the policemen's equipment is different. It is even the same and a good part of the citizens who fight for the same thing in two different times - for freedom. Well, evildoers are the same. The same are the unfortunate people whom Milosevic dragged to the counter rallies, the most terribly abused and humiliated poor world. The endless column of citizens moving along Kneza Miloša Street is the same. Therefore, through Goranka's photographs, we remember not only hope, but also despair. But a lot is different. The deceptiveness of analogies is what the work of interpretation is based on, and Goranka Matić's photographs are valuable material.

photo: Goranka Matić

The French philosopher Michel Foucault set himself an unusual task: to make visible what is seen. We see, of course, what is in front of our eyes ("in front of our nose"), but do we really see what has no meaning for us? Let's say, we can undoubtedly see hieroglyphs, but if we don't know what they mean, what are we actually seeing? Meanings are woven into our views. That's why we needed Goranka Matić and that's why we will always need her: she taught us how to give meaning to what we see. To understand what we see. She didn't bet on eternity, because if she had, she wouldn't have responded to the request of the day. However, she did not even bet on the request of the day (on that set and that here), because if she did, she would not have survived her own departure. Goranka Matić was simply always where she needed to be.