Guitar Visual Art

EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY: The new navigation MILAN ŽIVKOVIĆ 15TH – 20TH AUGUST 2016 SueRyder Gallery, Belavista Square (Old town)

THE NEW NAVIGATION

The difference between the end of navigation and the new navigation mostly depends on the viewpoint. Every place carries the possibility of a new beginning, and on the observer depends whether they would end the story or they would realize a new beginning. Milan Zivkovic has started a new navigation of old ships. He presented them in a different context, emphasized new values and imposed a new interpretation.

Photography is a document: by its mechanical and repro- ductive nature, by its orientation, need, intention, by its es- sence. It directs its optical eye to the reality around us, but it slips into interpretation so easily that its manipulative- ness has also become its modus vivendi. For this optical eye is pervaded by the aura of the observer, sorry – two observ- ers: the one who observes the scene in vivo and the one who perceives it indirectly, through the two-dimensional space of photography. I know for a fact that Milan Živković never has great pretensions or expectations from his photographic research, which is exactly why he is fully committed to directing his sensibility towards the scene he is attracted to and overwhelmed by at the given moment. So immersed in the scene, he is ready to change the guise easily from a clas- sical documentarian-narrator into a colourful poet-painter, who finds an abstract painting in a powerful texture and inconceivable colours of nothing but a wreck.

He plays with the bulky iron corpse as if it were a toy, care- fully watching it from all sides, from all angles, under differ- ent light, from a different perspective. He isolates the details and creates new, imaginative forms; he emphasizes the texture until it becomes palpable; skilfully explores colours to create a perfect tonal string. He moves from the obvious to the magical, from the real to the mystical, giving the ship human contours, while the real man is seen just as part of a larger picture, one of the gearwheels in a giant mechanism. What is fascinating is the ease with which Milan Živković dissects the ships by means of photography, just like their actual executioners, breaking them into thousands of layers, each of which bears the traces of time, scars

Poetic documentarism, Ivana Tomanović, MA

Milan Živković (1960, Bavanište) worked at the Natural History Museum in Belgrade: started as a taxidermist in 1984 and as a photographer and designer in 1986. From 2000 to 2005 he worked for the Direct Link Company Marketing Department as a pho- tographer and designer and was the editor
of the exhibition programme of the Cultural Centre of Kovin Photo Gallery. From 2005 to 2015 he was an editor at ReFoto – Magazine for the Culture of Photography and he now works as a photographer and lecturer at the ReFoto Studio and School of Photography.
He was one the first photographers with a Digigraphie Epson certificate and a Nikon ambassador in Serbia; a member of the Asso- ciation of Applied Arts Artists and Designers of Serbia (ULUPUDS).