OPENING: Thursday, September 19th at 20:00
The exhibition is open to visitors from Monday to Thursday during the gallery’s working hours from 17:00 to 21:00
Club Kocka Gallery
Youth Center Split,
Ulica Slobode 28
ABOUT THE WORK
“The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner, published in 1929, explores the dynamics of the Compson family through the perspectives of four family members in a complex, fragmented narrative structure. The family photograph in the novel serves as a means of integrating the past into the present, allowing characters to connect past experiences and emotions to cope with changes, loss, and unclear memories. Through photographs, we build and interpret family history, but the stories we share while flipping through albums with loved ones are crucial in constructing memory and narrative. As we leaf through a family photo album, we traverse the fragmented history of a family, bound like a book. The fascination with photography may lie in its ability to fragment time, reflecting the experience of psychological time interrupted by emotions and memories, as opposed to continuous external time.
The family photographic archive, which spans more than half a century, served as the starting point for Filip Milković’s new work. His grandmother maintained the ‘archive,’ arranging photographs into albums and writing notes with dates, locations, and other details on the backs of the photos. While he had already seen many of the more recent photographs, the author was seeing most of the older photos for the first time after his grandmother suffered permanent neurological damage, prompting him to explore. “What would memories look like without photographs? Where do photographic and neurological memory intersect? What happens to memories and images when the brain is damaged? What do photographs look like when no one is looking at them?”
Family photography records the past and shapes collective memory. Marianne Hirsch emphasizes that family memory is vulnerable and is transmitted through stories and photographs. Susan Sontag views photographs as memento mori because they capture transience and mortality. By freezing moments, we often photograph rituals, ceremonies, and leisure time, creating an idealized image that real families find hard to maintain. The author recognizes these rituals and highlights the act of taking photos at the table during celebrations, formal studio portraits, and the alternating of photographers in group photos to ensure that everyone present is recorded. He is fascinated by the inscribed dates and therefore displays framed photo backs. In this photo exhibition, we rarely encounter a ‘real’ photograph. In fact, Filip Milković’s recent work is characterized by a strong conceptualization of his understanding of photography. Thus, at the exhibition “Decades” by Filip Milković, we cannot view Milković’s photographs—at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, we encounter highly aestheticized representations of photographs in specific contexts, such as stacks of family albums or views of their inner pages, exploring the very nature and meaning of the photographic medium.
Fascinated by document flatbed scanners due to their high resolution and specific look, the author experimented by using the scanner like a point-and-shoot camera, creating original images by turning the glass surface toward objects. While the scanner images resemble photographs, they differ due to different rules of perspective; whereas a photographic camera captures only incident light, a scanner has its own light source. The laser scanning head records the image much more slowly than a camera, a process in which the author finds performative value, and thus a new way of preserving family photographs, whose story now takes on entirely new meaning. One of the specificities of the author’s approach is the search for ways to contextualize photography in order to examine its content and aesthetic, or expressive, capacities. He scans a series of photographs at the family table through plastic sleeves that have become distorted over time, showing the first signs of decay and alteration of the original aura. This is also the case with the image of a dance photo through partially transparent protective album paper, intervening in the perception of the photograph, which now needs to be repeatedly discovered in an almost ceremonial gesture. By presenting a pile of stacked albums in an almost totemic formation, with colorful accents on the covers, the author treats the photograph as an object, while the display of the tactile texture of the page edges evokes Op Art line compositions.
The unconventional method of creating images through scanning brings old photographs and albums to life, bypassing the flat reproductions typical of works exploring photographic archives. In Filip Milković’s recent work, the absence of narrative highlights the phenomenon of the photographic aura and the way in which memory is constructed. This, in turn, speaks to the fragility of memory, whether photographic or cognitive. By focusing on the material contextualization of preserving family photographs, a valuable lesson is captured about the experience of ritual and the perception of metaphotographic content.
Jelena Šimundić Bendić
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Filip Milković was born in 1997 in Zagreb, where he currently lives and works. He began his studies at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, completing a Bachelor’s degree in Cinematography from 2016 to 2019. After that, he continued his education at the same academy and completed a Master’s degree in Photography in 2022. His first solo exhibition, Family Album, was held in 2019 at Gallery f8 in Zagreb. In 2021, he exhibited at Lauba, also in Zagreb, with an exhibition titled I’ve Never Been Anywhere and I Haven’t Seen Anything. In 2022, he held two solo exhibitions – his graduation show Known Territory at Gallery f8 and Spring Cleaning at Gallery Spot. He also participated in group exhibitions, including In Process at Gallery f8 in Zagreb in 2018, and in 2020, he exhibited at the Exhibition of Winning Works of the DA! Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. For his work, Filip Milković received the Marina Viculin Award in 2021, which is presented as part of the Organ Vida festival. His works were also published in the 14th issue of Der Greif, in the YES TO ALL edition, guest-edited by Sylvie Fleur.
IMPRESSUM
CURATOR / Jelena Šimundić Bendić
NMG CURATORIAL TEAM / Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov, Jelena Šimundić Bendić
TRANSLATION / Jelena Šimundić Bendić
DOCUMENTATION / Glorija Lizde
SETUP / Filip Miković, Jelena Šimundić Bendić
DONORS / Ministarstvo kulture i medija RH, Grad Split
MAVENA SUPPORTED BY / Zaklada Kultura nova
SPECIAL MENTION / KUM, MKC, PDM
DESIGN / Nikola Križanac
PRINT / Kopiring