Stefana Savic

r e - c r e a t i o n s

ARTGET Gallery

Working in the border zone between documentary and fiction, factography and fantasy, Stefana Savic produces her photographic images with the minimum of mise-en-scène, cleverly using material at hand. The content of her re-created reality refers to the importance of private experience and the social meaning of individual lives in the domain of the everyday. Having the appearance of static tableaux, her photographs remind us of irrational short cuts, frozen moments in narratives, which, in spite of the photographer's presence and the act of shooting, seem to be unfolding out of our field of vision.

It is thanks to the cinematic character of these photographs that we can enjoy even more the simple act of seeing. We have the impression that a hidden camera is registering those moments in which one is involved with one’s own being, moments of daydreaming, but without stepping out of the socially conditioned models of behaviour. Although the actors in these photographs are caught in such states as reflect their confidence of not being seen by anyone, the space they occupy encloses them in a field of psychological force, thus enhancing the voyeuristic pressure. The viewer of these photographs becomes a voyeur, since the voyeuristic look is merely the curious look, which remains disguised. As in mainstream film, where the focus is by and large on the anthropomorphic, here too, the main subjects are the human face and human body, the relationship between man and his immediate environment. Within the boundaries of the everyday, and by describing and re-creating the imaginary real worlds of the tiniest truths, the simplest and the most direct details, Stefana is tactfully introducing the paradox of the most ordinary. As with Hitchcock’s suspense, which is based on the rule that the more ordinary some situation seems to be, the more extraordinary it promises to become, the heroes of Stefana’s work, too, continue living their lives beyond the frame. Although a certain degree of automatization of their gestures apparently implies a temporary break from the real world, we cannot tell if and when some of the elements will suddenly “turn against the wind”. Everything is pointing out to the fact that the story is not yet told.

What we see almost always depends in part on what we expect to see. Things are given meaning when they are looked at.


Katarina Radovic
(from the catalogue)