Until Death Do Us Part 2009-2010

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Freed from the obligations of an official wedding photographer, I wanted to record a wedding as a uniform visual narrative containing within itself a multitude of socially and culturologically conditioned differences, but eventually reduced to one organism – a body without skin, whose form is clearly defined by its skeleton and its inner organs, and where no sign or ritual has the same meaning outside of its context.

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In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “unconscious optics”, the camera, in its merciless neutrality penetrates the cellular structure of things that would otherwise remain unconscious. (…) Lived and observed, lined up in these photographs are ceremonies and rituals – old and new, and often culturologically hybrid – either crucial for the evolution of a marriage, providing for a happy family and offspring, or protection against the evil eye, or merely present in the form of practical jokes, as an excuse for showing off and partying. (…) The portraits of all these participants, brides and grooms, family members and friends – with their exultant or expressionless looks, their dignified or slouching postures, seated or in a dance trance – reveal the subtle details of human behaviour in such a sublime moment, and the different psychological states and motivations, which, with their numerous nuances, confirm and celebrate the complex nature of human affinities, leaving as much room for fantasies and happiness as for failures and vulnerability. At the moment of the joining of two people, they all become as one, and every such new beginning rekindles this appetite, even for those who lost it long ago. All wedding guests, as in Berger’s novel (John Berger, To The Wedding, 1996), symbolically turn into a single animal, a half-mythical creature, like a satyr with thirty or a hundred or more heads. Such a creature lives for a very short time, only a day or two, and will be born again when there is something new to celebrate, because it consists of those who briefly ‘got lost’ in happiness and spectacle, in order to store those moments in their memory.

From the text … “To Eternity” by Katarina Radovic

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Katarina Radović

was born in 1976 in Belgrade, Serbia. She studied History of Art at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK (1996-1998). Studied Photography at the Academy of Arts ’BK’ in Belgrade (2001-2005) and graduated in 2006. Lives and works in Belgrade as a free-lance artist.

Her works have been exhibited in personal and collective exhibitons in Serbia, Slovėnia, Austria, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain, Netherlands, France, Egypt, Japan. In 2007 her series “Women” was exhibited in the 4th “KAUNAS PHOTO” festival as a part of the theme exhibition “Mysteries, Secrets and Illusions”. In the same year she was granted the Kultur Kontakt art residency, and in 2008 her project about weddings was funded by the European Culture Fund.