* “in place of” in Croatian language has same meaning as “instead”
Subsistence cuisine usually reflects social poverty, slight existential nausea, bad family relations, low communicational and understanding level. There are no obvious reasons why on Damir Babic’s photographs (In) Place of Picture, should not happen the same. Moreover, the title makes us look for a substitute for a scene that offers itself. The difficulty lies in the fact that the food photographs are alternated with blocked drainage systems, therefore our imaginary visual space is filled by horror vacui and claustrophobic awkwardness, blocking the easy flow of our associations.
Photographs of corn mush and other comestibles, although nicely yellow, but blown-up, offer us somewhat awkward look on food. With the food, tightly pressed against bars, resembling those of a prison; the photographs have no spatiality, therefore the spectator is forced to step away from the photograph. As far as the physical space exists, the same scene repeats itself continually and constantly, and imaginary this pattern continues indefinitely. When we find ourselves behind bars, our perspective changes and we cannot be sure anymore whether, as spectators, we still are out of the scene, or a part of it, we do not know whether it is the food behind bars or it is us, do we observe the scene or take part in it. Babic manipulates the gallery in the same way accepting but also defying its function as exhibiting space; he creates an atmosphere in which the audience is exposed to anxiety.
Opposed to the big, warm photographs of food that multiply harmoniously, the same space is occupied by smaller ones of blocked drainage systems, colourless and cold, which in spite of the blown-up photograph, rejects every idea of touching, although the textures on the photograph incite the tactile. The disposition of those smaller, carelessly arranged photographs also reflects the restlessness they provoke, although they are almost completely static. The placid concentric circles may, however, indicate movement, but it is limited in itself, there is no way out, reflects complete pregnancy of situation and panics.
The dichotomy that occasionally means contradiction, but can also emphasise the same aspiration in two ways, is not unrecognised in previous and present works of Babic. Sometimes, for objects with imaginary landscapes the utter desolation of the desert is emphasised by the focused front perspective, the deep perspective, spatiality and horizon. When the detached objects from the photograph are looked on, through the same front perspective as before, the sky always gets its autonomous and independent space through which it accentuates the desolation, but preserves the spatial balance. For ‘(In) Place of Picture’ exhibition, the physical space of food is even more jammed by the anxiety of the blocked state, and the placid rhythm of permanent blockage disposition, is only more emphasised by carelessly scattered blocked drainage systems, which unsuspectedly emphasise no way out.
Apart from the feelings that enhance these photographs, giving them social character, we can also recognise the social context of Babic’s works from his previous works. ‘Skyscrapers in the Night’ (1990) with multiplication of pattern, as well as their real dimension associate to moments of global loneliness, as well as intimate urban loneliness from ‘The Unexpected Visitor’ (1992).
Exhibition ‘(In) Place of Picture’ brings resistance to picture, in numerous aspects of that what the painting as an object represents, therefore Babic substitutes it for a photograph. Partly it carries resistance to visual presentation, bringing it to multiplication of the very same scene, so jammed in the lens focus that our view is reduced to its minimum. Although Damir Babic likes to emphasise its primary connection to literature, it defies narration. However, with all the resistance, communication cannot be avoided, the same as its expression. Probably because of that, in the slight anxiety of his existence, searching for a place for his expressed feelings, he placed them – in place of picture.
Janka Vukmir
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Cycle “(In) Place of Pictures” consists of 21 photographs, 70 x 50 cm. They are snapshots of relieves from papier-m,chE covered with hard boiled corn mush and various food, mostly in inedible combinations. Two tubes are pressed into food as to remind a viewer of the look through the jail window. Images and their materiality are, in fact, frames for the space in which they should be placed and in which they will be finally conceived. The metaphor of that place is jail; itself a place in which the flow of images is stopped, in which images don’t enter any more and, likewise, don\’t come out; the place of isolation. Food, emphasized bowel visuality and the corporeality of images is the matter that at the same time stipulates them and makes them impossible, creates and destroys them. They are a request for blindness that should enable us to finally see and their repetition is the impossible request for one image.
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Damir Babic was born on August the 6th, 1962 in Zagreb. He graduated 1991 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Prof. Djuro Seder.
