Photo exhibition “Walk to work – Reframing Exercise” by Nenad Baćanović will take place on Monday, the 17th of November at UK Parobrod (Kapetan Mišina 6a) at 19: 30. Walk to work, open your eyes and notice Belgrade!
Unveiling his vision of Belgrade, through the observation of unusual details, the author of the photo exhibition “Walk to work – Reframing Exercise” – Nenad Baćanović, Art Director of Olaf & McAteer agency, presents everyday life of the capital from a different angle with its seemingly unnoticeable features and striking details. Visitors, photo enthusiasts and lovers of Belgrade will be able to see photos from the 17th to 23rd of November. Nenad’s photos are the result of the daily half-hour walk from home to work, that are converted into personal boundaries of creative exercises and represent something nice and unusual in the ordinary daily routine.
The exhibition emerged from the blog (http://elusive-wow.tumblr.com/) where the author sets the new contents on a daily basis. Author’s blog attracted a lot of attention for a short time. Photos could be described as documentary records of the city that is constantly changing, enriched with different layers. Photos enable highly personal reading of their content, as well as quotations from the modern art.
IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
About “WALK TO WORK – Reframing Exercise” photo exhibition
by Nenad Baćanović
Photographic contextures of Nenad Baćanović, from a collection aptly entitled WALK TO WORK, and subtitled Reframing Exercise, are seductive, layered and complex. They are a testimony to the world that surrounds us as a potential source of incredible transformations that are constantly occurring in front of our eyes but are, at the same time, dependent on our ability to spot them. At the same time, they offer an extremely idiosyncratic view of Belgrade – the city you only thought you knew so well, as you won’t be able to recognise it neither easily nor instantly on Baćanović’s photographs, which offer a view on segments of our daily lives broken into million pieces, mashed together and rearranged in elaborate visual metamorphoses.
Therefore, Belgrade presented in Baćanović’s work remains entirely in the eye of the beholder.
In the photographs from the WALK TO WORK collection, nothing is quite as it seems. While looking at them, you will first be drawn by an alluring abstract combination of colours and shapes, their distinct artistry and luscious texture. Some of them will remind you of work and authors of modern (mostly abstract) art (so you might see glimpses of Rothko or Klein here, and Malevich, Jackson Pollock or Rauschenberg there – the referentiality of Baćanović’s work is, by the way, truly impressive). Others will invite you to interpret them as you would Rorschach’s inkblots. However, only at the end of that complex and endlessly fun process of discovering all their layers, will it become abundantly clear that what is actually recorded on these photographs – although “utilised” or “transformed” would certainly be more precise terms – is this highly unglamorous, simple reality of ours. By an almost alchemical process of the author, its banality is transformed into a series of only seemingly abstract, highly aestheticized vignettes rich with endless possible meanings.
A reframing exercise, indeed.
So all the misery of our urban surroundings – all those twitches and spasms of an inadvertent Belgrade – becomes powerfully and profoundly transformed. Our dirty dusky corners, our chipped architecture, our rutted streets constantly in repairs, dilapidated facades, utilitarian grey power sub-stations, broken lights in building corridors, grids on basement windows, networks of antennas on rooftops, highways and junctions of thick wires and cables cutting through the sky above our heads, puddles created by carelessly mounted air-conditioning units, bare balconies, mucky windows on our drab grey buildings covered in sticky dust, all these things in Baćanović’s photographs become unladen of all their previous meaning and turned into elements of a transformative experiment or game.
The title of the WALK TO WORK collection is literal and it actually explains how Baćanović’s photographs are created. Every day, while walking to and from work, armed only with a plain digital camera and his unique talent, Baćanović discretely but relentlessly dissects our seemingly unexciting visible Belgrade and digs into its bowels to find beauty where we least expect to find it. What he discovers there well surpasses all of our expectations.
The fact that the beauty always and exclusively lies in the eye of the beholder was, of course, known even to our ancestors in antiquity. Daily, creative walks to work of designer and photographer Nenad Baćanović, and their extraordinary outcome – the unusually innovative collection of photographs WALK TO WORK – conclusively confirm and somewhat redefine this age-old premise.

Writer. Blogger. Traveler. Researcher. Electronic Music Lover.