20 YEARS OF FREEDOM
JOŽE SUHADOLNIK
October 14 — November 11, 2005
Ten years after his last exhibition in the Škuc Gallery and twenty
years after his first one there, Slovene photographer Jože Suhadolnik
presents his twenty years of "freedom". His longstanding
career and thousands of photographs made for special clients or
as entirely individual projects were presented in numerous galleries
both at home and abroad.
In the Škuc Gallery he exhibits photographs made between 1985
and 2005. Thematic blocs regardless of time and space of creation
present his 20-year photographic development and invoke the intimacy
of captured moments. The themes, or stories, narrated through
photographs from different parts of the world invite the viewer
to freely interpret them and journey into the unknown. The installation
does not advise the viewer how to understand the images but, rather,
speaks about Suhadolnik's personal history and his relationship
to his own work. The photographs are filled with energy, which
triggers infinite inquiries and associations with past moments
and situations. Physical presence, defined by time and space,
loses its meaning; images of life come alive in front of us, and
they remain alive even if we are physically absent. Or, as Mojca
Kumerdej wrote in her text Less than Life and More than Death:
"Jože's photographs contain something essential for the
photographic medium: niches, openings, cracks that slash and cut
into the viewer's gaze, making photography not only a mimetic
copy of reality — if this is possible at all — but
also generating meanings and contents in the gaps that engulf
the viewer's gaze. The attraction of Jože's photographs is similar
to the attraction we feel when our look catches the look of someone
else; in the next moment — out of surprise or, perhaps,
even shame at revealing desire — we withdraw our look only
to return and glue it onto the object as if with a magnet. The
majority of Jože's photographs exceed flat two-dimensional quality;
with every our look they spread out and open new provinces of
association and meaning, which is most probably due not only to
the form of composition and technical rules."
The exhibition will include eight thematic blocks, predominantly
focused on human being and his/her living environment, although
it will also include shots of animals and urban and rural landscapes.
Photographs will live their lives on the gallery walls, and they
will inscribe themselves forever into pictorial vocabularies of
every single visitor.
Curator: Alenka Gregorič
Programme of Gallery Škuc is supported
by: Ministry
of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Cultural
Department of the City of Ljubljana.
For further information contact Alenka Gregorič, artistic director
of Škuc Gallery on +386 1 251 65 40, galerija.skuc@guest.arnes.si