de Cinema - de Cuir - Zoran Tairovic, Romani Triptych (8-28 April ...

[Zoran Tairovic]

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May 1, 2012

Zoran Tairovic, Romani Triptych (8-28 April 2012)

The multi-talented, multi-media artist Zoran Tairovic made an impression on me with his gallery show at Student City Cultural Center in Belgrade (Serbia). The artist comes from Roma cultural and ethnic heritage and his work usually deals with identity as it relates to the Roma people. This is true of his experimental videos just as it is true of his visual art. However, his audio-visual work tends to be more theatrical while his visual art seems to engage more directly with history and society.

What strikes one when confronting this new exhibit is the depiction of Roma as a people found on the trash heap, or perhaps depicting them as literal trash heaps. One mural-sized photograph organizes Roma of all shapes, sizes, and ages into a pile of garbage. They lay on top of the pile with their eyes closed, playing dead. Perhaps this comments on the invisible nature of the Roma people, or even their inability to see themselves.

Another photograph, printed in a long rectangular shape that mimics the widescreen dimension of cinema, details an overhead view of a group of Roma laying on the ground spelling out a word that appears to be “Heidegger”. The people are wrapped in something like body bags, which to this eye evokes the conclusion of the film Sweet Movie by Dusan Makavejev. Tairovic’s image also expresses the passage from life to death (or vice versa) and he is as concerned with bodies as his more famous countryman is.

The reference to Martin Heidegger creates an echo with the numerous swastikas that mark Tairovic’s imaging. The exhibit also features a number of interesting self-portraits done in a collage pattern with passport pages, stamps, and other forms of identification. Some of these portraits attest to the history of other Roma, as if to grant them passage to a world they have not had access to. Or maybe as visible evidence of those who were not here from the beginning. The visa is another structuring motif of the exhibition. Like the famous Roma anthem “Djelem, djelem”, traveling and traveling. But no one seems to be moving in the visual art that marks this exhibition. At least, not in this terrestrial plane.

2:24am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZH4D0wKek9LQ

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Filed under: Roma art Belgrade Serbia exhibit 

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