4 February – 4 March 2016

Double exhibition, entitled Domestic Stories, showcases works of two distinctive and acclaimed contemporary photographers from Croatia, Jelena Blagović and Ana Opalić, who are individually exhibiting in Slovenia for the first time. Artistic practice of both is characterised by profound exploration of intimate stories that recount personal experiences of ordinary people within the wider socio-political context.

However, this accented intimism is manifested in their works on various levels. While with a huge emotional charge Blagović uses found archival materials to dig deep into the past of her own family, Opalić is more commonly faced with the stories of complete strangers who let the photographer close in order to profess their traumatic life experiences. Both artists therefore emphasize personal and socio-political context of the past and present from the perspective of ordinary man who is often insignificant and powerless in relation to his or her surrounding. Due to the temporal distance their subjects and contents, be it love letters from the distant past or testimonies of forcefully displaced people twenty years ago, could easily lose their primal emotional and intimate connotation. However, the artists preserve and perpetuate these connotations by using thoughtful visual means such as complete reduction of explicitly narrative images and contents.

At the exhibition Blagović showcases two series of photographs from the trilogy, entitled Unprotected Archives (2007-2013), Before Me (2007) and Family Silver (2010), which focus on personal episodes of her family’s and thus her own history. On the other hand Opalić presents the Home (2010-2013) series of photographs which puts forward the victims of various abuses during the civil war in Croatia in the 1990s.