6 September – 3 October 2012

The Stories from the Booths exhibition brings to life early production of Saša Marković Mikrob, recently deceased artist from Belgrade. Extensive series consists of predominantly black and white photographs that have been taken across a period of several years, from late 1980s to early 1990s, in the public photo-booths.

There are various situations and personalities, artist was encountered with in his every-day life, that were documented on these photographs with assigned comments. These were different public figures such as politicians, journalists, activists, relatives, friends, acquaintances and casual passers-by. Through spontaneous situations and performative photo-shooting he formed significant material which nowadays gives added value to precious documents of specific social and spiritual climate of Belgrade of that time.

Saša Marković (1959 – 2010), also known as “Mexican”, “Bridegroom”, “Bamboo”, “Mikrob” and “Ganesha”, was a visual artist, journalist, radio host, social worker and in a lot of ways a unique phenomenon in the Serbian alternative and art scene. He is engaged in art since 1985, when he started taking photographs of himself in photo-booths, and he enters the art scene in the early nineties, when he starts exhibiting his works in galleries. In addition to works from photo-booths, his body of work is also comprised of drawings, masks, performances, video-works, installations, album covers, objects and assemblages. He was a discophile, connoisseur of rock music, regular frequenter of concerts and exhibitions in Belgrade; he wrote poetry and dreamt of going to India.
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Saša Marković Mikrob’s text published in the Works from the Photobooths exhibition catalogue (Srećna galerija Studentskog kulturnog centra, Belgrade, 1992):

I am a marginal man. Upon my encounter with a marginal medium with limited possibilities I decided to give it a try. When expressive possibilities are restricted from the very beginning ideas find peculiar paths to expressions, allowing quite unusual developments. Well, unusual developments and bizarre ideas are exactly what I like. My activity is a discussion of private and public matters in a city forum. Just like the others who fight in the streets with me I want to earn money and affirmation, attain eternal life and gain political power. This is the story of all that.
In the spring of 1985 I was working as the layout editor of Student, a weekly magazine in Balkanska ulica 4. During pre-press I used to spend all night in the office. Every half an hour I would descend two floors to have a drink at a club owned by the amateur cultural association Krsmanac and I usually finished my work around 3am. Dog-tired, poisoned by beer and tobacco, I would go out for a walk on the streets and wait for the printing office to open. So, who is out at 3am? Taxi drivers? Police? Drunkards?
I’ve taken pictures of myself in photo booths ever since I discovered them at Zeleni venac and at Bezistan. Being a person who wishes to order things and submit them to my own mythology, I made a decision: I’ll take pictures fifteen nights in a row! I used to bring drunken guests from Krsmanac with me from the very beginning and put notes on the back of the photos. These served as the basic material for my future fanzine 3, 2, 1, FIRE!. My work at Student finished, I went to the seaside for the summer holidays. Upon my return I revisited the photographs and decided (on 1^st September) I would make these photo booth sessions regular.
This is how RENEWED FUNCTION started. I know a lot of people. I took all of them to a photo booth. Sometimes, if no one was available, I took pictures of myself. The outline of the project was clear even during this early phase. Sometimes I brought various pictures and texts into a booth, tampered with the lenses and lighting, or drew and pasted various objects on the photos.
In the spring of 1987 I began noticing the reject photos around the photo booths. Dissatisfied with the look or technical quality, the pose or even the motive for taking a picture, people tear or scrunch up and throw the photo away. I started collecting these fragments, putting them together and intervening in them. I titled this series THE NIGHT PATROL.
In May 1987 Nebojša Kandić – Dudek, an old friend of mine, introduced me to the phenomenal Antonije Pušić. Together we founded the secret organization KPGS. It’s the acronym for a vulgar slogan – KURAC! PIČKA! GOVNO! SISA! (Serbian for PRICK! PUSSY! SHIT! TIT!), where Prick, Pussy and Shit represented the antique trilogy and Tit is the satyr dance, which (during the intermissions between acts) describes the moral of the play to the audience. Much earlier, Kandić and I used to have endless telephone conversations while sitting on toilet seats. A typical dialog would be: Kandić: Prick! Me: Pussy! Kandić: Shit! Kandić later added the word “tit”, because he’s a satyr and a moralist.
KPGS was later joined by Srđan Jerotijević, illustrator, comic artist and a DJ at the Belgrade Faculty of Fine Arts’ club and Radio Šišmiš (Radio Bat). I wrote quite a lot of poetry at the time. Pušić renamed himself Rambo Amadeus, Kandić became Njegoš Serbezovski, Jerotijević – Yugoslav Ninja and I – Bamboo the Mexican. In a lively atmosphere we campaigned for Rambo’s first two LP’s until the organisation activities stalled. It turned out that the project was mislead into the mere promotion of a pop star.
The peak of my contribution to the organisation was a documentary video TRISTAN TZARA IS NOT DEAD, made in March 1988 by Dragan Nikolić (currently imprisoned in Austria) and a happening at the Belgrade Faculty of Fine Arts in the autumn of 1989.
I started the project entitled MONASTERY in the summer of 1988. The size, ratio and setup of frames in the photo booth card served as the pretext for a series of drawings and collages which contained no photo booth-related elements.
The project TE DUE was started in early 1989, when I started producing masks and other objects designed specifically for the photo booth sessions. I would put a mask on, while my partner’s face was left bare and recognizable. The phrase “te due” means “I love you” in Albanian. Montenegrin writer and Serbian journalist Nebojša Jevrić published an inciting short story in Dugamagazine. The storyline followed chicks from rich Belgrade families, who buy heroin from Albanian mafia led by an Istanbul-based Albanian. When they run out of money they are forced to have sex with their drug pushers and speak the words “te due”. In a talk we had in a “kafana”, Jevrić convinced me that the story was based on real-life events. Later I met a person who was familiar with the circumstances under which the text was initiated – the whole thing was made out of thin air in an alcohol-fuelled conversation. For me, this story about Jevrić and his story is the user manual for the TE DUE project.
The project entitled POLITICAL PARTIES has been running since May 1988. As a man of politics, collaborator of youth magazines and a participant in Belgrade public life for the last couple of years, I chose politically active individuals among my friends to take part. I invented political parties that would suite them and made the appropriate masks for each of them, which I used while taking pictures with other people. Some of these politicians may have been offended with such treatment, but I consider this project as my modest contribution to the laborious birth of our democracy.
The last two years have brought nothing but disappointments: prolonged communist rule, recession, war, dissolution of the country… This is when I started the on-going project entitled POST-POLITICAL ERA: RELIGIOUS SECTS.
Research into the various practices of photo booth usage led me to Great Britain and the City of Nottingham, to the artist known as Mixup. His PHOTOBOOTH PROJECT dates back to 1979. After a couple of letters we posted to each other he eventually came to Belgrade in September 1990 and December 1991. Two ardent projects were done during these visits: MIXING WITH MIXUP VOL. 1 & 2. During his first visit, strongly supported by Darka Radosavljević, we managed to organise his solo show at this very place. His art is bound up with surrealism, pop art and psychedelic art. His colours are vivid and lively (oh, how I wish Belgrade photo booths were so well maintained!). Mixup locates his work in the popular art (in his own words), it’s all about urban folklore and he insists on being called an artist. Later I came across the works of Jaroslav Supek from Odžaci. He is quite close to conceptual art. There is a touching thing about him: there are no photo booths in his town, so he has to travel in order to practise this serious activity. Mixup told me about an artist in New York who owns a personal photo booth and had been taking pictures before anyone else. I consider this to be a legend.
During all these years spent on the streets and around photo booths, I witnessed the joy people express in their encounters with this fantastic machine. Some of those who helped me are well worth mentioning: above all the legendary Dragan Blagojević, newspaper salesman from Terazije, members of KPGS, Petko, Darka, Ćami, Fleka, Z. Rosić, D. Vukićević, Vladimir B. Marković, along with innumerable other people. The work was obstructed by many practicalities: frequent, sometimes very long periods when photo booths were out of order, poor maintenance of the machines, bad chemicals, retirement of almost all black-and-white booths and, most of all, retirement of colour photo booths with four vertical frames in a strip, which offered the best possibilities of artistic expression. I took only a few pictures in this type of booths a long time ago.
Along with taking pictures I’ve used to make notes, chronicling the events I attended in particular and my mingling in Belgrade in general. Lately I’ve started expanding these notes into larger texts. Some sort of literary output is thus one of several possible outcomes of the project. Another possible direction could be more chronicle-like, linking to the project I’m about to start working on: SECRET COUNTRIES & PRIVATE ENTERPRISES. In this case, the project would have a formal goal: to take photos of a thousand different people in the next ten years. The third possible course could be visually oriented: taking individual pictures, as well as pictures inspired by photo booths, like making collages of reject photos found on site. In any case, the masks will continue existing on their own, outside the photo booth situation.
This selection is an extract from a total of some 1500 photo booth strips I made. The divisions between different thematic wholes are highly conditional. Many strips could be placed simultaneously into different series, some into none.

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This exhibition is result of collaboration between two non for profit organisations: REMONT from Belgrade and PHOTON from Ljubljana.

www.remont.net