Luka Milanovic’s first solo exhibition curated by Bojana Jovanović, entitled “Nowhere near” will be opened on March 9th at 7 p.m. in the Kula gallery at Cetinjska 15. The audience will have the opportunity to see sixteen digital prints of analog photographs on two floors of the gallery.The exhibition is open until March 16.
The gallery is open every day, except Monday, from 4 to 8 p.m.
Raiffeisen bank Serbia and Hooloovo are suporting the Kula exhibition program
Milanović’s opus mostly consists of depictions of landscapes without people, and although the occasional human figure is captured, it is seemingly secondary in relation to the surrounding environment and seems to be subordinate to nature and a representation of a “small and insignificant” man. However, these photographs do not aim to educate or remind of the ecological disasters caused by the human species, but to separate the depicted place from any imposed narrative and show it by itself in a space and time vacuum without creating a utopia from it.The human presence is felt in the photographs, whether it is through the demolished and abandoned houses in the distance or the beaten road leading to the open space.Everything hints that a man once lived here. Luka manages to take photographs of these places so that even his own presence is almost erased.These photographs are eerily quiet and unbearably introspective, giving them an uncanny atmosphere where the worst is expected (whatever that may be for the individual). Peaceful landscapes hide a dark truth, and a melancholic atmosphere, a gloomy sky, a dazzling foggy light, intertwined thin and icy branches controlled by the wind, the sound of which is eternally captured in that specifically chosen frame and reminds us that we are alone in this world, which does not have to be a negative feeling. They are not pessimistic, but extremely somnambulistic, mystical and symbolic, which makes them interpretable based on the sentiment of the one who observes them at a given moment.
The spaces in the photos can be anywhere, they can exist or be a figment of imagination, maybe they are the outlines of some long-ago lost memory of a scene from a dream or a part of the landscape that our eye catches while driving quickly through some landscape on the outskirts.They can be everyone’s and no one’s, everywhere and nowhere, here and now or nowhere and never. Luka Milanović manages to capture the atmosphere, the feeling and the pulsating tension that these places exude.The landscapes in Luka’s photographs leave the domain of all classifications and create their own space of existence and become a representative of the space in our head that has no limits. Full of chaos and unexpected twists that are completely under the control of our imagination, but also real spaces about which we know nothing and nothing binds us to them, and thus we are freed from all already known narratives, which causes complete unpredictability and freedom of mind. We are left in an in-between space, neither near nor far, nowhere near.
Luka Milanović was born in Valjevo in 1999. He has been active in the field of photography since high school, and has participated in two group exhibitions so far. He is a student of digital arts at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, where he is currently a graduate student in Aleksandrija Ajduković’s class. Luka uses analog technique for most of his personal projects. For this series of photographs in the Kula Gallery, he used a medium format analog camera – Mamiya RB67 with black and white negative film.
The spaces in the photos can be anywhere, they can exist or be a figment of imagination
