Tišine

Katarina Sopčić’s Tišine (2017) is a series of photo-diptychs. The photos are taken from 2008-2016, but their combinations in diptychs are from the present-day moment. They are presented in a relatively intimate format, one that resembles a personal photo album. The title “Tišine” is a play of words in Serbian, Katarina’s mother tongue. “Tišine" as one word stands for silences (plural). The photographs show fragments of the artist’s visual surroundings – landscape, nature, buildings, captured moments of travels, interiors, artworks, segments of bodies and faces. They are shown as frozen fragments of life and occurrences, as silenced eternalized moments. They are like video stills, deprived of sound and movement and therefore of the existence of time. When broken into two words, “ti” (you) and “šine" (rails), the title offers another reading. “You” (singular) suggests that the artist is addressing an invisible partner or a close friend, emphasizing the intimate communication with the viewer, who is invited to step into the private world of the artist. “Rails” can stand for the past journey that led her to the point where she is now, defined by the experiences and events during the time of her studies, fragments of which are shown on the diptychs. At the same time “rails” stand for the further course of Katarina’s artistic and personal path, opened through the final encounter with the fragmented past and expressed by the current diptych combinations. Katarina’s diptychs are formed vertically (up-down) and not horizontally (left-right), which would suggest a sequence of stories. This calls for an approach beyond the storytelling, to feel them, rather than read them. It is through the tension of juxtaposed fragments that a mood is captured, not a plot or a storyline. One might find some of them disturbing, like the juxtaposition of a fragile female body and the threatening freezing winter night. In the realm of these juxtapositions, an unbearable sense of longing is revealed, sadness, the sense of shivering loneliness, developing a dreamy, movielike atmosphere. In the artist’s own words: “It is melancholy that I find so beautiful, it brings tranquillity along and enables me to look within myself and to reflect”.