CUBO inaugurates the IN-CUB-ATIONS series with the solo exhibition of Serbian photographer Siniša Vlajković for the first time in Italy with his work on the Middle East, a land where he has lived for more than a decade with the desire to create a link between the reality of Bologna and the international art scene.
The exhibition project Out of Time. Reflections and Memory from the Middle East consists of 20 works documenting scenes of everyday life, landscapes altered by the presence of man, reminiscences of a lived sociality, theatres of silent lives. Out of Time, as if we could stop time and as if we were between two temporal positions. But these two conditions give us the opportunity to observe and compare reality.
This, according to critic and exhibition curator Zoltán Somhegyi, is what happened to the Serbian photographer as he travelled through the Middle East at the beginning of the new millennium. The artist's original intention to portray the everyday life of the Middle East soon turned into the self-portrait of an inner journey. The images document a dual journey: a physical one through space, discovering new places, and an inner one back in time, rediscovering elements similar to his childhood memories spent in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious former Yugoslavia.
Siniša Vlajković's work thus lends itself to two different levels of interpretation: on the one hand, the photographs are an artistic cross-section of everyday life in the Middle East; on the other, the subjects imprinted on the film can be traced back to his own personal past, in the different context of the present moment. Finding oneself 'out of time' can at this point become useful food for thought in defining our cultural identity. Just as for the artist, being 'out of time' will be essential and inspiring for self-understanding.
