Branko Cvetkovič: Non-space | Zerospace

The photographic exhibition Non-space│Zerospace establishes various states which, with photographic crops as momentary brakes, fragment and process the dynamics of time. The sea surface changes into a rhizome surface of endlessly multiplying creases, which transform the topographic preciseness of the shot into an area of contemplation and a symbolic plane of expanding time and infinite space.

In the vast naves of the sacral architecture the seas open a spiritual experience that does not stem from metaphysical implications, but from known phenomena and objects. Beyond the Black Square, in the space of the church choir, the oceanic surface conceptually turns into an empty reflection in the photographic series Dead eyes. In this intimate sanctuary death, landscape and the feeling of holiness become linked and intertwined. The painfully intimate shots of eyes document the absence of the gaze – the contradictory presence of absence – and place us in direct proximity with the distant gaze which arouses discomfort with the vagueness and the alien void. The dead eyes reflect total tranquillity, as if they mirrored the zero space of the tranquil sea surfaces without a horizon. Cvetkovič understands death as “the most elementary abstract notion in the entire structure of human consciousness and as a physical abstract of the non-space and zero time”. This unknown space of the absent consciousness is, as he explains, “the most abstract way of symbolising the human perception of space time and the perception or the incapability of imaging that they do not exist.”

However, the zero space is not merely a space of the ontological end and closure, in the same way as the black in the Black Square is not blindness or invisibility, but a system of dark lights or the glittering of darkness as we know it in certain rare moments when we close our eyes. The notion of the zero space as the antithesis of the space that Cvetkovič follows through the surface and light, is not so much something outside, in the landscape, as it is behind the wall of our eye.

Curator: dr. Nadja Gnamuš

Photo: Maruša Lapuh, GBJ archive