Ana Mihailović
ABOUT THE CYCLE OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN SILENCE BY DUŠAN ĐORĐEVIĆ
In the tradition of pagan rituals, where life and death are parts of a uniform cosmological circle with nature permanently developing within a perpetual shifting of life and death, the eerie is understood as a new and different life. The remains of rituals founded on the irrefutable mystery of nature within the shifting of natural cycles, light-dark, warm-cold, changeable-unchangeable appear in East Serbian tombs as a continuation of a different type of life, as a kind of reverse within the duality of natural-supernatural.
In rituals, that kind of duality has the role to connect life and death, to realise their fil rouge. The tomb is the “eternal house”, a continuation of the domestic space into the new place of residence. The symbolic continuation of the gathering at table or at the altar bringing offerings. The aesthetic expression of the colours and décor makes up a counter-balance, an addition to the things not present in the other world. This anthropological-ethnological phenomenon is caught in the photographs of Dušan Đorđević at the moment when daylight surges into the space and therefore emanates melancholy. Through the radiation of colour or a possible symbolic associative moment, it resembles the former life, imprisoned and petrified with finality.
With reverence and in silence Dušan Đorđević leads us gradually by the arrangement of his photographs, through three entities, carefully fitted into the gallery space as an authentic setting. The passage from one ambience into another is experienced as a qualitative passage through an ordered hierarchical sequel of different experiences, from the imperceptible everyday understanding of things to contemplative queries.
The mise-en-scène, showing the works in a harmony of rhythm and proportion, light and darkness, makes up an extended reality of photographs and invites the presence of the viewer.
The theme of these photographs, as an aesthetic representation of an ethnological phenomenon, is the beginning of author’s cogitation. His horizon is open to experiments and does not end at the two-dimensional sphere of a photograph. Starting from the representation of emptiness and existential termination – it opens up the questions of the perception of time and the relationship towards transience.
The precise, refined stills of the photographs, an ideal perspectival point, induce us to a wrong conclusion – that we are watching a studio-arranged composition. Those stills are a literal view through the window and the only deviation from a consistent “documentary value” is the manipulation of light. That graduated authorial selection “of the right moment within the existing ones” endows the light component with an eerie character.
These stills reflect an internal harmony of all elements of the picture. That intangible harmony, known only to the author’s intuition, dictates quiescence and the general atmosphere of silence; with its immense expansion it leads towards the a-temporal and eternal. The timeless dimension gives those photographs a hypnotic power, hiding the belief in the power of transcendental forces.
The desire towards the transcendental is common to the arts from the northern tradition, since the painting of Romanticism. With their format and reduced artistic quality they resemble the works of the Düsseldorf School of photography. The experiment the author uses to expand the medium of photography by diverse formal solutions, leads us in an ordered procession towards its own mystical experience.
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When one enters the gallery, filled with light, one observes the photographs in a regular way of viewing the world of objects. There is also the book as an intimate collection of memories, followed by the verses from Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The photograph frames are covered in silk, implying the shroud which heralds passage.
In going downstairs, we enter darkness, plunging into our own selves… The photograph within the light box surpasses the genre and refracts light in its own double reflection in the water into an experience of time transient and unstoppable.
We pass by lighted marks, meant for another life, through a space of shadows and reflections of our own dematerialised presence towards the certain, but unknown end…
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