WASTELAND AS A FRUITFUL CONCEPT

Exhibition: Wasteland, Sandra Vitaljić, Lang Photo Gallery at the Photo Museum in Riga, October 6 – November 6, 2011

By: Anita Kojundžić

In early November, the Photo Museum in Riga closed another Wasteland exhibition by Sandra Vitaljić, which marks two years of displaying a series of her works which have evolved into more than just a regional project and is far from exhausted even after so many exhibitions. Moreover, the series is available in digital format, at www.croatian-photography.com.

The author Sandra Vitaljić is one of the most important representatives of Croatian photography, and has worked as a photographer in newspapers, advertising and as an artist. Her most famous works include series of black-and-white portraits and nudes, which also establishes a distance between her early work and Wasteland. Big format landscapes whose titles reveal very specific locations – war crime scene that happened in Croatia (with the exception of Bleiburg) from Peasant Revolt in 1573 and World War Two all the way to the Homeland War. Apart from the horrendous common denominator, these are also the locations of events that have not been properly investigated, the criminals have not been punished, and the victims are mostly anonymous. There were several attempts to cover them up, forget or manipulate the facts, so that the past would appear more acceptable.

With this choice of locations, which is fraught with political meaning, Vitaljić does not allow us to contemplate at leisure the idealised simulacra, which is the truly subversive element of this cycle. One of the foundations to promote national identities in the media is the beautiful, unsullied nature of our country, which in the recent years, especially in Croatia, has become an important product internationally and economically. Following that trend, the market is overrun by this genre, existing somewhere between kitsch and fetishistic treatment of local landscape, with rare exceptions. However, it comes as no surprise to see landscapes used as means of constructing specific identities, showing nature that certain societies identified with. But these were heroic, idealised, monumental landscapes.

Vitaljić’s landscapes are mostly abandoned, overgrown, broken, somewhat threatening and inaccessible. Although comments were made how without knowing what the theme was, it would have been hard to figure out what the cycle was about, it is debatable to say the scenes are not suggestive: a muddy path, barren land, thicket, fog, decrepit monuments, deserted lanes… The author recognized the symbolic power of these relatively general motives and successfully revitalised it, because on the slippery ground of poignant symbolism and fashionable political outlook, it easy to stray towards the banal.

Although the artist addresses the viewer and provokes a reaction, it is my belief that the concept is based on questioning her own relation to the places on display because she is part of a generation that can only watch them from a distance, since she did not witness personally any of the events. The distance does not result from a lack of an emotional response but from an actual impossibility to go back in the original time and space and get to the objective truth. In time that has already created its historical constructs based on legends and ideological interpretation, she has to be aware of how absurd her artistic endeavour is. If all is well, her photographs document and witness the present and offer proof of the ambivalent relation to the past, which wants and does not want to be forgotten.

Certain post-modern theoreticians (Sontag, Berger, Barthes) were particularly harsh on photographs that documented political violence. They thought it was ineffective because they evoke a feeling of helplessness with the viewer who is appalled by his/her own indifference; there is no enlightenment, however; frequent exposure to such photographs, which are exploitative and manipulative, numb the viewer, in fact, and do not encourage any action; finally, such photography is an integral part of capitalism and political ideology, because by ignoring the entire social and political context, people are reduced to pathetic creatures. Circumstances of Sandra Vitaljić’s work avoid the trap these theoreticians mentioned. In a world where images of explicit violence are seen everyday, photographs about political violence without violence shown, bring back the freedom that was taken from us to be what we are – thinking beings.