Rezonanta 2015

Curator: Standing here, I immediately think…quiet drama. Do you get that, these monolithic forms against such stark white? Editor: Absolutely. This is Goran Despotovski’s photographic piece, "Rezonanta," created in 2015. It's interesting to observe how stark black and white photography still can stop us in our tracks like this. Curator: Tracks is the word! They feel almost like train tracks heading…nowhere? Or everywhere, I suppose. The title adds another layer. "Rezonanta"—resonance. Do these shapes, this arrangement, make you feel anything specifically? Editor: The repetition definitely gives a sense of rhythm, a kind of visual music if you will, almost as if the individual parts can't function without being arranged and set up as the whole ensemble. And of course the monochrome only heightens the feeling. These blacks set up an intensity, that I imagine were absent, even lost had Despotovski decided to use color here. But I also see institutional critique. How works are mounted, viewed, separated yet dependent. The human figure looking at the paintings heightens the idea that as social objects we exist to interpret. Curator: I like your emphasis on the rhythm here. In this setting, with the isolated figure as another line in this constellation of the monochrome, and rhythm in the linear, everything here starts pulsing. I think it challenges the idea of stillness in a gallery; this piece in fact feels full of motion, paradoxically. I bet in a different exhibition it may well mean completely other things. Editor: It’s true—Despotovski asks us to look at the very nature of perception itself. To realize art’s dependency on a stage and its players. It gives new meaning to photography as a way to look at how a social setting is, not necessarily how it is supposed to be. Curator: Beautifully said! This dance of dark and light really makes you reconsider what photography and the museum space can offer, and how art relies on these very simple tensions to say so much. Editor: Indeed, something for us to ponder even as we move on.