Chez Marieme Soda Diop

 

 

by Katarina Radović, photographer

 

 

Published in the catalogue of Katarina Radović's exhibition When You've Stopped Combing Me, I'll Stop Hating You in the Museum of African Art in Belgrade, June 2016

 

 

  

Saint-John Perse’s famous verse in Eloges XVII (Praises) “Quand vous aurez fini de me coiffer, j’aurai fini de vous haïr,” (When you’ve stopped combing me, I’ll stop hating you) could probably best describe what all black girls feel towards their mothers, older sisters or cousins during the several-hour long rituals of hairstyling, a dramatic event in the life of every African woman.

 

The initial idea for this photographic project was born in Paris in 2006, while walking through Château Rouge. It’s the 'Little Africa' of the French capital: markets with exotic fruits and spices, shop windows dressed with objects made of brush-wood, percussion instruments and pumpkins, the shop selling live chickens (confidential sources say that they are sold exclusively for magic rituals) and numerous hair salons and tailor shops. The hair salons attract attention in an unusual way, with contrasting faces of the clients: from those smiling and delightful, to those shrivelled and worn-out. The shy yet confidential smile of a young woman, leaves me with the firm impression that the woman answered affirmatively to the passing comment: “Are you preparing for your future husband?”. The thorough weaving of small braids and decoration of the hair with various plugins – that uncompromising sacrifice for beauty, a work that demands that hours and hours be spent at the hair salon, combing, snipping and braiding, with the inevitable discussions about the day’s events – seemed to me to be a very interesting topic for my camera. However, during one of those nights, talking with my friend Diaga from Senegal who so graciously welcomed me to her home in Paris that autumn, I discovered the other side of the story. While she was combing her hair, and preparing to go to a hairstylist the following day, she kept saying: “This is what I have had to put up with for more than thirty years... This mindless, incessant hair-pulling! And all this with the goal that I should look beautiful and feminine - but at what cost!? Maybe you could make a series of photographs about that - with your crisp sense of humour and your poetic eye, you could work on this subject very well.”

 

Several years later, the opportunity presented itself – in Africa. I applied for a residency programme at the Centre for Art and Design – WAAW, in the old colonial town of Saint-Louis, Senegal, that lasted for a month and a half; and during the summer of 2013, I managed to produce this photographic work. The main focus of WAAW is on artistic projects that are relevant for the local creative community, while the centre is led by a group of Finns, admirers and experts on the subject of West African life. My story took place at one of the most frequented hair salons in Saint-Louis – Madame Marieme Soda Diop’s – an almost exclusively women’s world, the zone of intimacy and gossip, where with the use of the traditional accessories and techniques, the entire spectre of women’s hairstyles emerged: from the completely ordinary to the incredibly lavish, depending on the occasion. Each of these hairstyles demanded time and patience, but also, indubitably, a certain dose of agony and pain.

 

Hair has always had a special significance in the majority of African cultures, especially as a medium of power and communication in traditional societies. It was not only seen as a decoration of the head (which is the source of wisdom). Many African traditions believe that hair contains the life force, erotic potential and fertility, and that it also signifies the person’s identity. In addition to that, African hair is very specific, and demands thorough and time-consuming treatment, as well as the frequent application of various additional materials. My interest was not primarily focused on the end product – hairstyles. I tried to record the beauty in the coiffeuring of these hairstyles – the interaction between satisfaction and pain in the process of creating hairstyles in this African culture, as well as the personal emotions invested in this ‘sacrifice’ for the higher good, i.e. as the initiation into society and identification with certain ethnic, cultural and age groups, as well as the symbolising of social and economic status, religion, etc. I was intrigued by what I had seen and read so far, but also by the things Diaga told me. I had tried to decipher, first hand, how pride and glory have their price, and how the stories about the desires and ambitions, and the stories of the shudders of pain, intertwined with the stories about hair. Today I firmly believe that there is something in the relationship between hairdressers and their customers which comes before the final product: the mixed feelings of tenderness, pain, obsession, seduction, trust, rivalry, love and hate; and that this ritual, to a certain extent, represents the model of the 'sado-masochistic' relationship. Those feelings were exactly what I wanted to capture in my photographs – by using the example of African hair.

 

The photographs from the series When You’ve Stopped Combing Me... also reflect the feeling that, hand-in-hand with the glamourous and the exotic, there is also the sombre reality of the African origin itself. In Senegal, beauty is an important subject of debate. Despite the ever-growing influence of global fashion magazines and television programmes, as well as the advances in new technologies, the appearance of women to this day largely evokes the concept of the raw, native beauty and the elegance of the so-called signares[1]. Even though the streets they walk on are sand and stones, and the soles of their feet are as thick as leather, the women in this part of Africa dress up not only for special occasions, but they even go to collect water looking like queens. I wanted to document the states, which point to the 'before' and 'after' moments in this process of dressing-up; which evoke the feeling that there is a goal in the process of the transformation of the hair, and with that the entire head, into a special art form and cultural entity, with all the symbolic implications: the desire to be liked and admired. It is the observer who should imagine for which occasion each and every one of these women is preparing, and what each of them is feeling.

 

This entire subject is rich in various meanings; but it is also interesting, not only for the local communities, but for the wider public, since it belongs to the history of colonialism and migrations and to the positioning of the women’s role in societies where the economic and social discrimination of women still takes place, where women still tirelessly do all the housework, while men are mostly responsible for taking all the big decisions as regards the family, and in cultures where (less so in the large cities) clitoridectomy is still practised. Under such circumstances, women have needed to find a sort of relief, to satisfy the desire to be different and to be liked and to find some ways to entertain themselves, socialise and to fill their free time. Apart from all of this, what is also interesting is the opportunity to meet women from faraway cultures, women from the Third World – the chance to hear their voice and their personal vision, by seeing it through the prism of a patriarchal society partly similar to the one I come from, which still has unidentified and tangled views on what is ‘marginal’.

 

It was not easy to photograph people in Africa, especially women. There is a certain burden with ancient beliefs in the magical power of photography, and then there are the various religious barriers of the Islamised ethnic groups of Sub-Saharan Africa; but also, to no less an extent, the realisation that someone might, in practical terms, abuse the photographs, display them in an inappropriate manner, make money out of them, etc. Thus, the photographs that are part of this project were made in agreement with the models. Friendships were established, and in the majority of cases, the models were compensated. None of this would have happened if I had not had a guide, i.e. the middleman. Doudou appeared completely by chance at the WAAW and recommended the hair salon of his elder sister Mrs. Soda Diop, with whom I made an agreement that allowed me to take photographs of the models and hairstyles, while covering the expenses for materials used and the work. Going through magazines and choosing hairstyles, we agreed in advance about the things we would be doing on a specific day, with Mrs. Soda suggesting aspects of the activities to which I should pay special attention, and without hiding from me the secrets of her mastery. During all this, Doudou, with a lot of effort and cold beer, was translating from French into English and vice-versa. Mrs. Soda explained the meaning of each hairstyle and pointed out on which occasions one would wear it. I was slowly and surely accepted as an inevitability by both the workers in the salon and the customers. Doudou and I came to the salon almost every day at exactly the same time. As we would slowly start to work, in the meantime, ataya – green tea with mint leaves, made in the Senegalese way – would be served... The first round... the second... and then the third. Then at a certain point, the work would stop and lunch would be served – most often thieboudienne[2] or yassa[3] with chicken or fish – sometimes on a low table and sometimes on a cloth on the floor in the middle of the salon. At that point, hidden members of the extended family from the living quarters would emerge from the shadows. We would all eat together, while they would offer me, as a special guest, the best pieces of meat, fish or vegetables and place them on my side of our large shared plate. I was observing the everyday life of this faraway culture in all its finesse and trying to decipher what they were talking about in their local language. Later, I found out that the topics ranged from how to get the sheep or goat to the sacrifice for the Tabaski holiday (known to us as Eid al-Adha) to who had won the traditional laamb wrestling competition[4], or what had happened in the current telenovellas they were watching on TV. From time to time, they would ask me about where I came from, and what it was like in that eastern part of Europe. One of the younger male members of the household knew that there had been wars in the former Yugoslavia, but it was not important where exactly that place was. While the fan wrestled unsuccessfully with the heat, and the music jingled from the small transistor radio, the faces of the local marabout and models from the torn pages of the fashion magazines looked down on us from the walls. After lunch, with the new round of ataya, mothers would breastfeed their babies, and from her corner, a silent old woman, the eldest member of the household, would look at us with approval. Indeed, I managed to elicit an occasional smile from her ancient face. In time, I felt completely accepted: I was even given a name – Awa, which could be translated as Eve and which meant that I was completely welcome.

 

When the relatives finally returned to their quarters, a women’s circle would form again, and continue to work until late into the evening. While somewhere in the distance, in the men’s world, the songs of the Mouride[5] or some other religious fraternity could be heard, hands were busy in this salon, as were scissors, combs, needles, even the candlelight and the razors, and artificial locks of hair, nets, pearls and cowry shells were used as hairstyle extensions. Following the often painstaking process of hairstyling, incredible creations would emerge from the salon, with satisfied smiles and expressions of gratitude on the women’s faces. Often, local passers-by and neighbours curious to see what was happening and why it was being photographed would pop into the salon. I was satisfied with my photographic material – and grateful as well, even though it took a lot of time in the beginning for some customers to handle their shyness and restraint in front of the camera. When finally – in an improvised studio made from the fabrics found at the salon – I photographed the end product, i.e. the hairstyle of each model, lacking the verbal means of communication, I would sometimes have to use my body language to inspire them to pose, move their heads to the left or to the right, smile... It is true that the younger women were more willing to cooperate than the older. But, we did not always manage to understand one another well, so they would often shyly and comically imitate my hand and head gestures, instead of understanding my movements as suggestions on how they should pose. Then Doudou would return to the rescue and help with the translation, while Mrs. Soda would jokingly encourage them to relax. I believe that intuitively Mrs. Soda and I understood each other perfectly well - except over one thing: at a certain point, she tried to get me to become an additional member of her family!

 

Nevertheless, in the end, we kept to the practical and business part of the plan: Mrs. Soda’s salon received its well-deserved advertising and I got a new series of photographs, while these lovely women and girls got their new hairstyles and – in many cases – their first printed photographs.

 

Perhaps what charmed me most was that, in this little hairdresser’s salon in Senegal, the desire for beauty and the need to be liked and admired proved far stronger than the pain!

 

 

   

[1] Signares were women of mixed French-African ancestry who lived in Senegal in the 18th and 19th centuries and enjoyed certain privileges and power in the social hierarchy.

[2] Thieboudienne or ceebu jen is a traditional Senegalese dish from Saint Louis, made from fish, rice and tomatoes and vegetable sauce.

[3] Yаssа poulet is chicken made in the Senegalese way, in an onion and lemon sauce, with rice or couscous and vegetables. There is also a variation with fish instead of chicken meat, called yаssа poisson.

[4] Laamb wrestling is a traditional, highly regarded Senegalese form of wrestling and the only variation of this sport in West Africa that allows fist fighting.  

[5] Islam is the dominant religion in Senegal since the 11th century; however, it is practised in a different way in comparison to most of the other Muslim countries. In part it originates from the mystic Sufi traditions, which means that most of the Muslims in Senegal are members of one of several religious fraternities, dedicated to their marabouts – founders or spiritual leaders. The Mouride fraternity is one of the most prominent and largest of the fraternities.

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Constructed Realities

 

 

by Irena Šimić, art historian and Gestalt therapist

 

 

Published in the catalogue of Katarina Radović's exhibition Constructed Realities in NOVA Gallery in Belgrade, September 2013

 

  

 

There is always a threatening abyss in what they create. They disturb you even when they are joyful, and leave you discontented even when they laugh. What is inside them is not serenity, but only comedy. /…/ These sorts of people find pleasure in gazing in depth, commotion, analysis, attack, ridicule…

                                                                                                                         (Béla Hamvas about artists) 

 

 

Humour is one of the constants that make Katarina Radović’s photographic oeuvre coherent. It is quirky, sophisticated, intelligent, and often dark, parodic humour. Laughter produced by parody is not the simple-minded, carefree laughter that can claim to have healing properties; there is something malicious about it – something that makes us laugh and gives us the creeps at the same time. Parody is amusing because it refers to something normal (normalised), in comparison to which the parodic image is comic (Frederic Jameson). However, that is not all. This understanding of parody implies that there is the original, on which the exaggerated imitation of its unique features is modelled. But what if the original does not exist? What if the model is also a copy (like the doll from the series Constructed Realities or the plush rabbit from the series Desire), a failed implementation of the presumed archetype (anima or lust)? Then we are entering the terrain of a special kind of parody that is truly subversive and disturbing because it reveals that the normal, as a measuring instrument and an anchor in the world, does not exist (Judith Butler). We can go further than that and, like Katarina, disrupt the boundary between reality and fantasy. We can notice that the doll in the photograph is imitating a woman that is imitating a doll, or that there is no essential difference between the pair of plastic feet offered on the plush cushion and a pair of feet attached to someone’s legs, as an object of fetishistic adoration. The comedy of the mannequin doll that is removing the hair from her upper lip and the cut sausage on the leash, positions us before a threatening and gaping abyss where the last foothold in normality (the boundary between the real and the imagined) sarcastically vanishes.

  


 

 

 

 

 

... To Eternity

 

 

by Katarina Radović, photographer

 

 

Published in Katarina Radović's monograph Until Death Do Us Part, Belgrade, 2011

 

 

 

It took a certain amount of time, the shaking or shattering of every prejudice and fixation from the past, and my being quite perturbed by all sorts of temptations, in order for the image of wedding and marriage to acquire what may be for me an entirely new form, dimension and significance... In the course of my two-year project of exploring the wedding ceremony – as one of the oldest anthropological genres – I had a chance to step into different corners of the European continent (and even further); to meet for the first time with what weddings are like in reality; to witness probable and incredible stories and customs; to taste something from each of those plates; to experience states of both rapture and melancholy; and to produce a firsthand record of all those scenes. Then, having completed my odyssey, I stumbled over the mine of an ‘ideal’ marriage, which in its pre-explosive state showed me that the ‘ideal’ can only feed on artificial respiration; after which, to top it all, I received a proposal of marriage for the Kingdom of Heaven(!) So, after all these experiences, with the accompanying perichoreses, peripeteia and kairotic moments, perhaps it might have been expected that I would step out of the whole cycle with entirely new feelings and attitudes(?) However, now, at this moment of giving final shape to my project Until Death Do Us Part, I still find myself facing the same, extremely difficult, recurrent metaphysical questions:

 

A beginning before an end? A beginning of an end? Or, an end before a beginning?

 

The idea of a wedding, and therefore, of marriage, has always carried a certain weight for me, as if the horizon were suddenly blurred, and madness extinguished to allow eternity to take its place. “What shall we do before eternity?”, asks the bride of her groom during the whirl of their wedding feast in John Berger’s novel To The Wedding (1996). On their wedding night, Ninon will take off her shoes and dance with Gino. They will dance as though they will never tire, as though their happiness is absolute, as though death will never disturb them. This almost archetypal image could be affixed to most of the weddings I was present at: a photograph of the moment of bliss, love and happiness, of triumph over transience. But every love story contains from the beginning an inkling of its own collapse. Eventually, whether death do us part or do us bring together will remain hovering there as a question of doctrinal or intuitive conviction.

 

If marriage, as a social institution, was originally conceived with the idea of procreation in mind, as has been the most common attitude over the centuries, it could be said that it represents the journey, not the final destination. However, as a consequence of many historic changes, some new questions are breaking through: What is the point of getting married if nearly half of marriages nowadays end in divorce? What is the connection between evolution and the ever more frequent marriage ‘for papers’? What is the social goal of gay marriage or of marriage between elderly people? Does everything, as my ninety-two-year-old grandmother has so often and so aptly declared, only come down to “mutual respect and interest”? Or can getting married actually be a gesture of pure and unconditional love?

 

In Berger’s novel, we encounter an example of marriage in which, in spite of devastating sorrow and hopelessness, love conquers all, even death: a young girl infected by AIDS gets married to a man who insists on marrying her because he loves her; she resists the idea at first, but eventually accepts it; the wedding feast is prepared, the lamb roasted, the various dishes cooked; and the family members are gathered, the courtyard around the house is tidied. And, yet, just the two of them, and a few close friends, know that she can only hope to live for a few more uncertain years. Every morning she wakes up and looks at herself in the mirror, searching for evidence of pain and blemish... The hour-glass is running too fast, and this wedding, like a vortex, draws both the characters in the novel and us, the spectators, to the very core of the problem related to the social meaning of marriage. As a response to the sense of one’s own mortality in such a delicate situation, and in the face of the absurdities of existence and of the evolutionist idea of marriage, a strong need to love prevails. Here, marriage is only a temporary station on the way to eternity...

 

In his Essays in Love (2006), Alain de Botton implies a similar standpoint when he says that the logical climax of “immature love” (immature because it is “absolute”, and has nothing to do with age) comes in death, symbolic or real, whereas the climax of “mature love” is in marriage, and in attempts to avoid death via routine. Yet, it would seem ‘death’ is likely to arrive sooner when things are defined, fixed... 

 

Marriage deprives us of the consoling option of perpetual possibility. It is, above all, a binding contract which implies a recognised long-lasting relationship between (in most cases) two people, who are expected to invest all their efforts in a cohabitation and agree on a division of duties and resources, with the aim of raising future generations. But there is nothing more desirable than what will soon disappear or what is forbidden or unattainable. Human beings are not monogamous (just as almost 99% of zoological species are not), and infidelity is more a problem of a psychological than a physical nature. However happy we may be with our partner, it is our love for him or her that inevitably prevents us from pursuing alternatives. But why should that bother us at all if we truly love our partner, unless our love has already started to fade? Why are we sometimes saddened by the impossibility of living more than one of the many life scenarios that we archive in the immense area of the imaginary? As if, at certain moments, we feel nostalgia for the times when a definite choice was not a necessity.

 

Neither Church nor State likes divorce. The marriage vow ‘until death do us part’ could, throughout its history, be interpreted as offering at least a tiny release clause. 

 

However, apart from a certain floating uneasiness, rarely do we have the image of ‘the end before the beginning’ at the moment we are entering the state of marriage. There is, primarily, that comforting feeling of planning and preparing for the future, a kind of investment in time; credit that it will certainly take a long time to repay, and sometimes with great difficulty; and, in the worst scenario, a spanner in the works of the future control system, which could remain mercilessly screwed up. Although there is no absolute guarantee for the future – and exactly because it is the present which is the most difficult to live in – there is an intensified need for security and for earthing in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, expressed via an appeal to a common destiny.

 

It is the wedding ceremony that metaphorically projects and reflects that appeal, that potential image of the future of couple, often crowned by the eschatological dimension, which gives meaning to everything through the prism of eternity. Yet, there always seems to remain that thin, slightly disturbing ‘crevice’, that latent fear of ‘the beginning of the end’, of loss, confronted with the suppressed doubt as to the rightness of one’s choice and decision. And that ‘crevice’ is also photography, so complex and contradictory as a medium, which, by some analogy, ominously announces ‘death’ with its every recorded moment, while at the same time presenting its ambitious, though precarious, claim to the truth. A photograph that documents triggers further thoughts, such as whether an image, along with its magical potential and its bipolarity – between mortalisation and realisation – can really contain its content? From the moment my camera’s shutter snapped, each of these photographs of wedding ceremonies, of parades and their personages, has borne in itself a seed of absence, of some a priori melancholy. The seed of absence also from the moment of that solemn act of union which will remain, if nothing else, a test of personal, and then, collective memory. 

 

Freed from the obligations of an official wedding photographer, I wanted to record a wedding as a uniform visual narrative containing within itself a multitude of socially and culturologically conditioned differences, but eventually reduced to one organism – a body without skin, whose form is clearly defined by its skeleton and its inner organs, and where no sign or ritual has the same meaning outside of its context. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “unconscious optics”, the camera, in its merciless neutrality penetrates the cellular structure of things that would otherwise remain unconscious. But here, apart from the anatomical precision, it is also the personal attitude and acquired experience:

 

in a fluctuating embrace, between celebration, humanity, closeness, nostalgia… and excess, vanity, humour, absurdity... 

 

Lived and observed, lined up in these photographs are ceremonies and rituals – old and new, and often culturologically hybrid – either crucial for the evolution of a marriage, providing for a happy family and offspring, or protection against the evil eye, or merely present in the form of practical jokes, as an excuse for showing off and partying. On the wedding day, everything has to be perfect, because if something goes wrong, the whole marriage could turn into a failure. Hence, everything has to look as perfect as possible: settings, details of decorations, flowers, food arrangements on tables, clothes, shoes, jewelry, hats... On this day, everybody is at their best, and that is also part of the investment in the future. The wedding feast is the happiest moment in one’s life – but apparently not for everyone: while for some it means a new beginning, the somewhat gloomy looks of those who have moved away from the beginning a long time ago are evidence that there is always a flutter of uncertainty in love, that there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and that nothing is as simple as it seems. The portraits of all these participants, brides and grooms, family members and friends – with their exultant or expressionless looks, their dignified or slouching postures, seated or in a dance trance – reveal the subtle details of human behaviour in such a sublime moment, and the different psychological states and motivations, which, with their numerous nuances, confirm and celebrate the complex nature of human affinities, leaving as much room for fantasies and happiness as for failures and vulnerability. At the moment of the joining of two people, they all become as one, and every such new beginning rekindles this appetite, even for those who lost it long ago. All wedding guests, as in Berger’s novel, symbolically turn into a single animal, a half-mythical creature, like a satyr with thirty or a hundred or more heads. Such a creature lives for a very short time, only a day or two, and will be born again when there is something new to celebrate, because it consists of those who briefly ‘got lost’ in happiness and spectacle, in order to store those moments in their memory.

 

The role of wedding photographs in the complex network of individual memory points, above all, to their private meaning; their greatest importance is to those who are in them, and as such, they most often remain in hermetic circles of families and friends. However, as usual, the established ideologies of groups can overrule the inclinations of their members. Thus, the officially commissioned wedding photographs, in their conventionality, can be more than merely the way in which individuals wish to be seen; presented to the public, they become signs in the interpretation of family and social histories. As material evidence, they meet certain expectations, but they provide even greater satisfaction because they show family structures as capable of straddling the tensions between ideal presentation and real experience.

 

On the border line between private and public, free of imposed canons, these colourfully ambiguous photographs of weddings and their protagonists are displaced in a different context of presentation and interpretation, and in this way, not only call attention to themselves as objects of general significance, and raise a number of questions, but also point subtly to both the Persona and the Anima of the social act of wedding ceremony.

 

However strange it may sound, it could be said that almost all weddings are the same. There is something in the very spirit of that event that equates them, regardless of their cultural specificities. Yet even when they fully recognise the obvious social norms and send out all the expected signals, there is always room left for exceptions and surprises. And that is the case with weddings between couples of different cultures or different races, and couples who are in conflict with society or on its margin. Then, the question arises as to in what way the rituals and customs, as well as the mere wedding celebration, actually serve to strengthen the feeling of individuality and community, when two different sets of cultural conventions meet and either find their melting point or cannot avoid confronting each other – evidence that personal histories can have a hard time fitting into family histories, and family histories an even harder time fitting into histories of communities, nations, races, continents...

 

Even since ancient times, when the enamoured Zeus, disguised as a bull, seduced and abducted the young nymph Europa, daughter of the Phoenician King Agenor – a myth according to which the European continent seems to have taken its name from an emigrant from Asia – there have been numerous contrasting peoples, races, languages, religious beliefs and ideologies on European soil. Encouraged by many centuries of migrations, conflicts and changes, these diversities have opened up an almost unlimited number of possible mixed marriages. Although historians and anthropologists insist that the group, be it family, tribe, nation or state, always comes before the individual, it could be interesting and useful to return, however briefly, to personal histories, as in these photographs.

 

In love, be it “mature” or “immature”, in our quest for ‘the absolute’, ‘the eternal’, or just “interest and respect”, we often long and search for something exotic, remote, something that is missing in our courtyard. As if it were a rule, as de Botton also pointed out, the initial spasm of love finds its inspiration in something unfamiliar; and by choosing partners from other cultures, or even races, we become attached to values that are missing in our own culture. We fall in love with the other, the ideal, because we want to get away from our own deficiencies and insecurities. Therefore it seems easiest and most logical to fall for someone who is entirely foreign, in no way conditioned by our knowledge, about whom and about whose tradition and culture we know next to nothing. Perhaps it is only then, in our moments of bliss, that we can fully ‘escape’ from ourselves. But afterwards comes the natural instinct to discover the being we have come to love and who has accepted us as we are, and at that paradoxical juncture of solipsism and emotionally coloured exoticism, in the process of our acclimatisation to the other, we often become victims of a xenophobic feeling of exile from our own tradition and our original expectations. It is then that history and anthropology take over again.

 

Therefore it is no wonder that the photographs presenting the wedding ceremonies and feasts of mixed couples are replete with indications of national, religious and other identities – symbols that assert one as opposed to another. The climax of the game is reached with the criss-crossing of those symbols, which is quite permissible, even very welcome, on the day of the wedding celebration because, it is moment for the reconciliation of differences. One is curious to know how, at these moments, members of different cultures and traditions see one another – whether Europeans in African boubou dresses seem weird and funny to the Africans themselves, whether Indians in Scottish kilts look to the others like characters in a theatre play, or whether we can take the Hungarians seriously enough in their performance of the Hare Krishna wedding ritual. In the end, the experiencing and propagation as opposed to the innate fear of differences, is much more complex and delicate, sometimes, even, a more human and personal process, that it might at first seem. After all, this is the case with everything to do with human relationships.

 

Following the line of European thought, from the Nietzschean revolt against Christianity, through the sexual revolution, to the Baudrillardian ‘illusion of the end’, marriage and family have been experiencing a major transformation. In his essay 'On Gay Marriage and Revolution: The Metamorphosis of the Western Family' (2003), Michel Onfray, reminds us how Christianity at its beginnings established an ideal of abstinence and renounciation of this world, offering as the sole option against the extinction of civilisation: marriage(!) – in other words, absolute monogamy, life under the same roof without secrets, and sexuality at the service of reproduction, with everything else to be considered a sin under the threat of eternal damnation (whether behind that threat there is a dogma, or more radically, a wife or a husband!). On the other hand, libido and the life force have been paving their own way through the centuries, so that cuckolds and betrayed wives are continuous proof that conditioned faultlessness is mere anesthesia, that the body and personal choice also exist outside of the family, and that this world is more than sufficient without the next one, so that it needs neither philosophy nor religion. The classical family, wriggling free from the embrace of the Church, has given way to the so-called ‘postmodern family’, which transfers the determinism of nature and the authorities more and more to the freedom of culture. Interethnic, interracial, interreligious and homosexual models of cohabitation are obtaining a status equal to that of a classical heterosexual marriage registered within one community. Conceived in this way, and supplemented by freedom in the sphere of reproduction, the family is being increasingly transformed into a locus of conscious agreement, where personal feelings and aspirations for happiness prevail over any other religious or moral value, and where an individual begins to control his/her own destiny. Viewed from this ‘onfrayistic’ angle, life in a couple, married or unmarried, is actually a “philosophical and existential construct“ – one might also say, an experiment.

 

Be that as it may, the time has come for me to complete my two-year project with this selection of photographs, which do not conceal a certain degree of wonder at the phenomenon of marriage, shown in its many contemporary forms and from a number of perspectives. Although undomesticated to the environment that was the subject of my research, I wanted to express a personal viewpoint, in which a photographic image as an end result does not count for much more than what precedes or succeeds it in the long chain of events, thoughts, emotions and decisions. All these images, observed as a whole, besides their denotative meaning about the institution of marriage and the wedding ceremony today, emit the already well-known message that no matter how perfect something may seem in its flickering and suavity, deep down it is containing unfathomable secrets and inextricable knots. In the cosmic process of time unwinding, in countless life plots and denouements, involutions and evolutions, in subordination or emancipation, what triumphs, in the end, is the need for procreation, and humanity but in the broad sense of the word – humanity in all its gradations of beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, comedy and tragedy, pleasure and pain, ups and downs... And that is what makes this life interesting.

 

But let us for a moment return to eternity. With today’s collapsing reality of a continuous present, and the experimental nomadic subjectivity experiencing its many little deaths every day, the idea of immortality is being increasingly deconstructed and dissected. The question arises as to what principle is at the source of the human need (or right) not to disappear – as a counterbalance to the creation of the species. In his book The Illusion of the End (1994), Jean Baudrillard implies that there is no history without Utopia, but criticises contemporary man's need for an artificial biological survival at any cost, in a kind of prophylactic Utopia, as opposed to the lost metaphysical Utopia that had originated in the vision of an ultimate Christian empathy. Expanding on the medieval question as to the concrete forms of bodily resurrection, by asking whether we shall resuscitate with all our wishes, secrets, neuroses, handicaps, viruses, deliriums – in short, with our unconscious, Baudrillard ironically alludes to the simulacrum of 'ideal resurrection', which excludes all negative features, and eliminates the distinction between reality and representation.

 

Well, if that really is possibile, if we could indeed expect everything to be purified, immunised, idealised and filled with love – fragrance of paradise?! – then, I would gladly think about that marriage proposal...

 


 

 

 

 

 

“It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness”

 

 

by Jonathan Boulting, poet

 

 

Published in Katarina Radović's monograph Until Death Do Us Part, Belgrade, 2011

 

 

 

To wed, and thereby cross the threshold into the world of married life – Jonathan Swift´s world of “bad words in the day, bad smells in the night” (“For Love has pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement” – and it wasn’t just about Eros Yeats’ Crazy Jane was speaking to the Bishop, but the Lord of the “many mansions”.) With photographs, we neither hear those words nor smell those smells:  the photographic image, relieved of all acoustic, olfactory, textural context – relieved of climate – assures us of a safe distance from the dangerous matters at hand, the imminent entanglements of wedlock. We will not even hear the nicely chosen ‘nice’ words or smell the odours or perfumes of the wedding day itself.

 

Ours is the safe distance of the voyeur, that comfortable somewhere between envy and repulsion. A grateful distance, too, should one be suffering from delusions of extra-marital freedom (everyone is hopelessly ‘married’ to someone or something – be it only oneself).

 

A photograph of a moment one has experienced deepens one’s feelings of loneliness, since it testifies to the absence of that moment (for evermore? until the end of Time?) It has passed away, metamorphosing into a memory. In the words of Emily Dickinson, with whom Miss Radović shares a solitary fascination with the Beloved Other: “Perception of an object costs/ Precise the Object’s loss – “. 

 

But a photograph distances one from the memory of the moment also: it presents what is in fact a camera´s memory, and is therefore, by its very otherness, a reminder of the loneliness of one’s own memory. A photograph is nobody’s past, nobody’s memories.

 

This is partly why wedding photos possess a particular poignancy. A wedding, the union not only of two individual human beings but also of the millions of other beings, human but also animal, vegetable and mineral (stardust included) present in their genetic make-up, promises an end to all loneliness – a universal union. A photograph, on the other hand, if absorbed by a truly naked eye, can only bear witness to solitude. Here we enjoy and suffer the paradoxical experience of the camera as a chamber of solitudes, but solitudes which are celebrations of human unions at their most intimate, most universal.

 

What is additionally ‘particular’ about this solar plexal poignancy, which perhaps constitutes the essence of Miss Radović’s art, is that it introduces – I was going to say, ‘us’, but perhaps I should say ‘me’, the isolated observer – to the other half of the truth about marriages: that maybe there is no ‘other half’ – that there are moments (on the Cross, for instance) when one feels “One is one and all alone/ And ever more shall be so”. Indeed, in the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina (where one of these weddings is celebrated), newly-weds are exhorted to love and honour one another as one another´s ‘crosses’ – gratefully, as the cruces of one another’s immortalities.

 

2 is the loneliest of numbers (unless you are a swan and at one). But among all these newly-weds, only one (perhaps two?) seems to have realised that s/he is already solo – that where 2 = 1, 1 = 2, the key equation in the mathematics of the heart (this more conscious newly-wed is probably the more loved, less loving of the two, since there is more burdensome loneliness in being loved than in loving.) And if the occasional (female) wedding guest seems slightly envious of the couple’s innocence, doesn’t she also derive a furtive solace from the knowledge that that innocence will eventually surrender to experience… probably to babies too (and their unexemplary behaviour!)? Was it Ogden Nash who remarked, your spouse isn’t someone you can be with, but someone you cannot be without?

 

Promising marriages start with promises – with what G.K. Chesterton called ‘rash vows’. Since these photos show trans-tribal and often secular European weddings, in most cases it is unclear what kind of promises have been made, and in the presence of which goddesses, gods or God. However, whether she knows it or not, the wide-eyed, dead-pan Miss Radović is both an intuitive and a logician – a laterally somnambulant detective? – and a prophetic eye will discern in her photographs some small detail, such as the lift of an eyelash, a crease in a jacket or reflection off a dress, a twist to a finger, a bite in an abandoned bit of wedding-cake, or a shaft of light across a kitchen bin, which augurs with infallible accuracy for the imminent ‘lover’s night’ (every night is a ‘first night’) and for the future of the marriage, its duration or intensity.

 

(And duration and intensity are not necessarily incompatible dimensions – it will partly depend on the lighting. The discovery of Uranus, planet of divorce, coincided with the discovery of electricity, and there can be no doubt that the principal cause of divorce is the electric light bulb. Constant wattage monotonises the face of the beloved. Face and body were never meant to be seen under a static light, but under sun, moon and stars, firelight and candlelight... ) 

 

However, another thing these photographs promise us is that none of the marriages are going to be boring – least of all the boring ones! There is truth in W.H. Auden’s gaily perverse dictum, “The most boring marriage is infinitely more interesting than the most passionate romance”. The interest lies in the mystery of cohabitation. That the attraction should be so strong or the repulsion so weak that two beings should choose to share the same miniscule corner of an immense universe must be especially fascinating for a visual artist, such as a photographer, whose Prima Materia is space (in light). And some of these photographs reveal, in the odd gesture of hand or foot, couples already rehearsing the dance that will negotiate their territory.

 

Weddings remind us that sex is only part of the story. We see here evidence of other instincts driving towards marriage: food, territory, will-to-meaning; sleep, death; here and there, traces of fear.

 

Most couples, in the reality of their appearances, are either incestuous mirrors or complementary opposites of one another, and Miss Radović´s samples provide no exceptions to this rule. Interestingly, the cultural &/ racial differences the photographer celebrates here often seem to mask an incest. In all of the marriages I sense considerable ‘interest’ and at least a modicum of ‘respect´. In only one do I perhaps detect the betrayal of a Shakespearian “Married Chastity” (à la Phoenix-&-Turtle), the diversion of a passionate attraction from its creative teleological imperative towards a probable merely genital consummation. With another wedding, I wonder whether it isn’t perhaps a not uncommon case of two people finally getting married in order to separate for ever. And am I right in suspecting that for one of the grooms, it is just about to dawn that in marrying him, his bride is marrying her mother? But, alas (for a nostalgic Byronian such as myself), with none of the brides (except one?) do I feel that the lady is destined for an old-style ‘cavalier servante’.

 

Despite the frequently secular appearances, Christianity still casts its mysterious ninth-hour shadow over these ‘post-Christian’ European celebrations – the protective, forgiving shadow, I would suggest, of a religion which originated in the deophile ‘adultery’ of a 15-year-old Jewess, and Whose Divine Son’s first miracle was performed at a wedding feast: the Dionysian transformation of the water of the Law into the wine of Love. Celibacy was urged as the ‘better option’ by St. Paul not because he was a Balkan Bogomil, but simply because he believed that Christ’s Return and the End of the World were imminent and there was no further point to procreation. The Abrahamic imperative had always been, “Be fruitful and multiply!” But for the uninitiated, who seem to imagine that ‘religion’ (i.e. Christianity) = marital fidelity, it will come as a surprise to discover that the miracle at Cana was a miracle of marital inebriation... and that in the Christian Heaven, there is “no giving or taking in marriage”.

 

Marianne Moore, another inspired spinster, raises an apposite question: “This institution,/ perhaps one should say enterprise/ out of respect for which/ one says one need not change one’s mind/ about a thing one has believed in,/ requiring public promises/ of one’s intention/ to fulfill a private obligation:/ I wonder what Adam and Eve/ think of it by this time...” We all know of ‘public marriages’, tragical-farcical unions with no secret core of privacy, whose imaginable (as well as economic) factuality can only be preserved by the attention of the media – marriages which depend for their very survival on their existence in the mind of the ‘Public’. I can think of at least one such marriage, almost touchingly grotesque, in Belgrade. And of quite a few others in London. My own family, for instance, boasted a film director heavily invested for some years in pseudo-scandalous wedlock to a former Hollywood child-star even wealthier than himself and less than half his age. It was, in fact, one of the most boring ‘middle-aged’ marriages one could ever hope to fall asleep in. What kept it going for an empty while were the distractions of jealousy (she of his past, he of her future lovers) and the voyeuristic attentions of the interviewers and photographers.  Strange to say, only rarely does one feel that the Miss Radović’s camera has been invited to help validate any of these unions. Or was the photographer’s gently ironic posture too apparent to permit of masquerade?

 

Nevertheless, all weddings are in some sense public spectacles. Paradoxically, as with other public spectacles, it is perhaps side-, back- or off-stage where the important things are usually happening – the ‘butterfly effect’ of Chaos Theory, be the ‘butterfly’ a wide-eyed child, an ancient widow or divorcée, an uneaten fruit, a closed window, an empty chair, a billboard, a patient radiant tree, or even (shocking in a photograph) a painting. Or (also living that loneliest of numbers perhaps), a couple of horses, a couple of dogs.

 

Things happen centre-stage too, with the couples themselves, in a glance off-guard, or somewhere between the lips and the teeth. I have found it illuminating to view these fascinating documents alongside Veronese’s ‘Marriage at Cana’, where Christ, although &/ because He is absolutely centre-stage, is almost invisible, although &/ because He is the worker of the miracle. The photographer of these weddings seems to participate in the same creative modesty, or auctorial invisibility.

 

When we come to Tintoretto’s ‘Cana’, however, at Santa Maria della Salute (inspiration for Laza Kostić’s beautiful poem of that name, the strangest epithalamium ever composed), I must stop – or risk (another) fight! Here is where the chiaroscuro of a Master silences photography. Photos offer glimpses of how we actually look at life – intermittently, promiscuously. So photographs are perfectly suited to the reality of weddings as we actually experience them. They even offer us a little extra time to experience the experience. But Tintoretto is how we could – or (dare I say it?) should – see life.

 

“At the touch of a finger” Miss Radović´s camera has threatened, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “to fix an event for an unlimited period of time”. But this is only a nightmare: photographs too pass on into our memories, entering the soul and participating in its metamorphoses, its infinite evolution. They provide us with absent glimpses of moments wholly and eternally present only in the Mind of God (from every angle, including inside-out, and including the camera’s) – a God Who is always in Three Minds... a God of Triangles...

 

My most vivid memory from Until Death Do Us Part is of the photograph – or rather, the still? – of heels, houghs and hems... That photograph says it all.

 


 

 

 

 

 

A Day To Remember

 

 

by Katarina Mitrović, curator in the Historical Museum of Serbia

 

 

Published in Katarina Radović's monograph Until Death Do Us Part, Belgrade, 2011

 

 

 

Until Death Do Us Part is a meticulously planned two-year art project of research, collection of material, organising and photographing. Between March 2009 and October 2010, Katarina Radović travelled to over 20 countries and attended over 40 wedding ceremonies. All these ceremonies took place on the European Continent, apart from one, which was in fact a double wedding, first arranged in Europe, then in Africa. At every one of these ceremonies, the artist took on average 300 photographs, thus creating a series of approximately 12000 images. This photographic project focuses on two issues. The first concerns the meaning of the wedding in modern European society, in its ritual life as much as its symbolic representation, while the other one refers to intercultural relations as realised in mixed marriages or marriages on the margins of the dominant cultures of a community.

 

All the weddings the artist has photographed are characterised by the fact that they are culturologically 'curious' in a variety of ways. For example, there are the cases of the weddings between members of minority groups in countries, such as the Peruvian wedding in Barcelona, the Hungarian wedding in Bačko Petrovo Selo (Serbia), the Roma wedding in Boljevci (Serbia) or the wedding of the Hungarian Hare Krishna devotees. Others are extraordinary due to the fact that the partners are of the same sex, especially considering that gay couples have only just recently won the right to marriage or some kind of registered cohabitation in most European countries, while in many other countries, Serbia included, they still have not secured that right. What makes the majority of the weddings unusual is that the partners are of different national or ethnical origin, or of different religious confessions. Thus, mixed couples line up in the photographs: Greek with Austrian, Spanish with Nigerian, British-American with Brazilian, Dutch with Slovenian, Croatian with English, German with Turkish, French with Israeli, Serbian with Vietnamese, Indian with Mauritian, Belgian with Burkinabé, and so on.

 

The artist has pointedly avoided the conventions of wedding photographs, which are often charged with schmaltzy sentiment, such as the scenes of the exchange of rings, and of the bride and the groom gazing amorously at each other and posing for the photographer in a 'romantic' setting. Her series of photographs is envisaged as a document rather than as the series of conventional wedding photographs usually intended for an album. This documentary character of her photographs is reflected in the variety of the wedding iconography, ranging from entire areas specially chosen and decorated, to the details that accompany them. The project is wholly inclusive, and this huge series of photographs records everything, without distinction, from a traditional wedding costume, a white wedding dress, or a national costume, rings, garters, and the indispensable flowers, to wedding cakes, tents, bows, a red carpet, and food arrangements on the tables. When it comes to wedding participants, the artist also avoids the conventions of typical wedding photographs. Indeed, the bride and the groom are not always the main protagonists, nor does the artist stick to any kind of hierarchy of representation. Everyone present is equally in evidence in the photographs, whether they are guests, relatives or friends, or musicians or waiters. The photographs record wedding participants in moments when they themselves are posing and controlling the picture, but they also 'catch' them, paparazzo-style, when they least expect it – their glances, moments of dressing, discreet adjustment of hair-dos, moments of deadly boredom or frenetic gaiety, moments of relaxed conversation, of resting their feet after what was probably a long and tiring period of standing or dancing. This enables the photographs of Katarina Radović to offer the observer the specific impression that she/he is taking a peek 'backstage' and that he/she has access to unplanned memory, some sort of a blind alley where wedding participants would never wander themselves.

 

When I was talking to Katarina Radović about this project, we kept returning to the question of the essence of a wedding. Why are weddings necessary? Statistics in the EU countries show that between 1970 and 2007, the number of marriages dropped by 38%. In that same period, marriages became more and more unstable, which is indicated by the increase in the divorce rate from 0.9 per 1000 citizens in 1970 to 2.1 in 2007. What is the point of marriage? If you are not getting married 'for papers', or out of some other 'interest', that is, if the system you live in does not discriminate you based on whether you are married or not, and if giving birth to and taking care of children does not depend on your marital status either, and if many countries recognise common law marriages, it is then quite logical to ask yourself: What is marriage for? Why tire yourself out arranging the ceremony and spending huge amounts of money organising a grand celebration, picking the clothes, the restaurant, the menu, the music?

 

Another question that presents itself to us while looking at Katarina's photographs is, to what extent is a wedding a private and personal, and to what extent a public and social act? We know that in our history the idea of a marriage as an emotional union between two individuals is rather new and radical. From times immemorial, marriage has been a matter of political arrangements, tribal alliances or lucrative family contracts. In the Middle Ages, marriage became institutionalised through the Church as a universal mechanism of social control and the only legitimate framework for producing offspring. Therefore, marriage has been first and foremost a social category, but has now, it would seem, come a long way from the social to the personal.

 

Of all the events of life, a wedding is among the most exciting. Apart from birth and death, there is no other act that baffles us as much as getting married. We could say that Katarina Radović is, in a way, obsessed with weddings. In her previous project A Husband in Paris, she took on the role of an Eastern European girl who, searching for a better life in one of the EU countries, walks the streets of Paris 'on the look-out for' a future husband. After obtaining the consent of the 'candidates' chosen as husbands, the artist performed before the camera with her 'fiancé' in one of the conventional poses typical of couples. In the project Until Death Do Us Part she also uses the marriage theme, deepening its potential, in order thereby to problematise important issues in European society today.

 

No matter how much our personal integrity as individual human beings is uncompromisingly protected by the law, there is no other act that affects us to such a degree, not even today when people get married and divorced more easily than ever before, nor one that changes our identity so much as a wedding. Joining yourself with another individual still has some of the fatalistic echo of the phrase 'until death do us part'. It is because nobody gets married with the idea of getting divorced. When they decide upon the act, a person projects him- or herself as member of a couple, choosing their life companion.

 

As in any other performative ritual, self-affirmation, whether of an individual or a group, is the basis of a contemporary wedding in much the same way as it was in the past. This need is so strong that it may be the only possible explanation for the practice of getting married, which has become totally redundant if we take it that the relationship in question is merely an emotional one. The project Until Death Do Us Part reveals that wedding celebrations nowadays have a lot of the carnival spirit, in the Bakhtinian sense. Their structure is basically the same: the ceremonial, official part, in which a legal union is made between two individuals, and the less official part, the celebration. There are also the changes in the behavior of the participants. The first part is full of gravity and dignity, the appearance is meticulously prepared, the clothes are ceremonial, the posture upright, and the movements controlled. After the formal ritual joining the two persons in marriage, there comes the celebration, the part of the wedding in which control is loosened. In some countries, the period for weddings comes immediately after a long period of religious restrictions, such as fasting and restraint from other pleasures. Katarina Radović's photographs point to the fact that weddings today are still collective celebrations in which the participants transgress the limitations of everyday life, forgetting their usual duties, their job and position, and surrendering themselves to excess, to purely carnal pleasure, intoxication, overeating, uncontrollable laughter. There is copious evidence of this in the large number of photographs in the series which have food as their focus. Food is present in its extraordinary festal abundance. There are photographs of cakes or roast meat, especially in its simple 'rustic' form, both of which are the kinds of food that have been so rare throughout the greater part of history that even today, in the time of consumer culture, they have preserved their clear associations with ritual sacrifice and human beings’ predatory instincts.

 

Not only is the structure of weddings that of a ritual, but weddings also share another characteristic with rituals – that of repetition. A wedding is imagined in a time context. It is a planned memory. Ritual repetition connects us with the past more than the nature of modernism itself would allow. For modernism separates us from the past, it always proposes and supposes something new, something radical, a break with tradition, with the ancestors. That is why contemporary wedding ceremonies contradict the idea of modernity. In a way, they represent repetition, and the repetition of a wedding ceremony in a time when weddings are becoming obsolete, is one of the most durable performative modes of remembering. If we think we have discarded rituals, weddings prove the opposite. By performing the wedding ritual, by repeating the ancient customs, by inventing new ones, by mixing and combining them, we actually connect with each other, and with past, but also with future generations.

 

The meaning of marriage as an institution has been called into question by the development of civic society itself. The right of an individual defies any limitation, and marriages are abandoned at the same rate at which they are made. This has caused marriage to become an increasingly personal matter. As it has become more and more a question of personal choice and less and less a means of social coercion, marriage has gradually been transformed into a field of minimum risk. So, if we pose the question today: Why get married?, we could just as pertinently ask ourselves: Why not? We cannot lose anything, our freedom is guaranteed. And so is our right to leave, when love has faded or our interests no longer match. For Katarina Radović, this pragmatic and selfish individualism leads unmistakably to a new understanding of marriage in contemporary society, in an era in which information technologies incite us to individualistic lifestyles and impose a fast pace of life. Inspired by the study of a Norwegian social anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, concerning the contemporary culture of the tyranny of the moment, i.e. of our times, in which the only thing we ever more increasingly miss is time, the artist sees marriage as a kind of inevitable 'vent'. And indeed, it seems that entering a marriage in the context of globalised contemporary society and the ever greater acceleration of time, provides a sense of consistency and reveals a need for some kind of balance, or at least, an illusion of stability.

 

Working on this project, the artist had in mind one far-reaching consequence of mixed marriages, as predicted by the geneticist Oliver Curry, in whose distant future of the human race we find a gradual disappearance of the contemporary races and the appearance of two new ones – one superior and the other inferior. This point of view seems to be a logical consequence of observing the global world of today and how the world's wealth is controlled. The erosion of strictly defined racial and ethnic boundaries is followed by the mingling of different cultures. Nowadays, cultural traditions are no longer obligatory, they have become folklore, a kind of ethnographic note that one can manipulate. Traditions, with their customs, costumes and rituals, have become spaces in which one can intervene, which one can summon or reject at will, depending on our needs. The very act of getting married, as well as the cultural traditions invoked in any cross-cultural ceremony, are in themselves departures to other spaces, distant worlds. They are a form of practical ethnography, in which, by calling upon diverse cultural traditions, we temporarily erase the fact of cultural uniformity in the contemporary global world.

 

Intercultural dialogue, the existence of cultural diversity and tolerance are values which have been promoted by the EU for decades. However, on October 16, 2010, in a convention of the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union in Potsdam, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, to the general amazement of all of Europe, that the German concept of a multicultural society had utterly failed. Not long after her, the British Prime Minister David Cameron repeated a similar judgement in his speech at a security-related conference in Münich. Katarina's photographs celebrate the differences, but they also remind us that in the culturally unified environment of the greater part of a Europe dominated by uniformity and impersonality, the exploitation of cultural differences is threatening to become more and more a screen for ideology. Rather than in real life, shaped by the cruel logic of the development of technology, cultural diversity is being pursued in the sphere of the imaginary. Differences are displayed in ephemeral events, festivities and passing rituals. They are less and less a part of everyday life. Instead, they belong in the sphere of entertainment, of something childlike and non-committal. 

 

To understand the work of Katarina Radović more fully, we have to keep in mind that her interest in cross-cultural weddings in European countries is also connected with the artist's specific background. She comes from a country which used to be part of Yugoslavia, a country in which multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity were values promoted long before the creation of the EU. Before the narrow-mindedness of the nationalist ideologies of the 1990s, life in Yugoslavia meant at least a superficial awareness of the culture, history and folklore of the different nations and ethnic groups inhabiting the country, and the state ideology of 'brotherhood and unity' had its application in everyday life with the huge number of 'mixed marriages'. Now, after a decade of wars and interethnic and international hatred, multiculturalism is being recommended to all the countries which emerged from former Yugoslavia. The experience of a person who lived this multiculturalism at a time when it was not even called that, is significant as regards her position when initiating this project.

 

Collecting field material in the classical sense of the methodology of anthropological research, the artist acts as a typical privileged observer armed with a scientific view of the world. The artist's background plays an important role here as well. Within Europe itself, the Balkans, as an exotic, culturally remote 'Other', has for centuries been the object of an occidentalist view, articulated in literary and artistic genres, from travel literature to paintings and photographs. In this relationship, the Balkans is, as Marija Todorova has formulated it, an 'imaginary' area of constant conflict, of bizarre contrasts, of odd people and phenomena which, compared to the dominant Western culture, represent a certain anomaly. In her project, Katarina Radović assumes the role of a superior observer. She is the one observing, travelling, doing research, collecting and documenting 'odd' phenomena throughout the European continent, thus thematising the very acts of observation and the political (hegemonic) pretensions underlying the very practice of collecting and forming collections of images. That is the background to be kept in mind when it comes to Katarina Radović’s project. The moments she has recorded are mainly out-of-sight scenes, most of which would probably never find their place in a wedding album. That is what makes these pictures unambiguously revealing and the people in them uncompromisingly exposed. In a way, they have been caught red-handed, unaware of the fact that they are participants in a visual performance that presents a colourful and amicable multicultural world attempting to overcome all the tensions that could shatter its tranquility. It is that part of the planet which is called Europe and which likes to think it has found ways to incorporate tradition into modern culture, to establish a balance between the old and the new and to reconcile all the differences successfully. It is only through careful interpretation that the complex structure of Katarina Radović’s art project is revealed. Through thematising the wedding as an anthropological phenomenon and displaying the contents of its performative artistry, the project actually problematises contemporary social contradictions. The artist warns us that the personal is always also political, and that no ritual is sheer form, but rather always articulates certain processes in society, which, in the final analysis, have a far-reaching effect.

 


 

 

 

 

 

Until Death Do Us Part

 

 

by Nebojša Pajkić, screenwriter and film critic

 

 

Published in Katarina Radović's monograph Until Death Do Us Part, Belgrade, 2011

 

 

  

I think that conflict, a term central to all the so-called dramatic arts, and at first glance not necessarily immanent in the various differently calibrated representational arts, is a good point from which to start thinking about the photographs of Miss Katarina Radović – or, more precisely, understanding the diverse components interwoven into her project Until Death Do Us Part, which has been conceived and carried out in a way one might call totalitarian. What we have here is a multitude of images, the result of nearly two years' work throughout the regions of Europe, dedicated to recording wedding ceremonies which in most cases represent the joining in marriage of individuals belonging to different cultures, at the least, or, in more exceptional cases, to different races, or, even more radically, to the same sex.

 

Hence, the first field of conflict is to be found in the very basis of the project, in its thematic fixation (the wedding ceremony) and in its connotative or, more obviously, its conceptual nomination (until death do us part).

 

That is to say, a wedding, apart from its ritual, ceremonial manifestation, represents an act of social organisation whose raison d'etre is the continuation of the species, and this is opposed to, indeed, imposed on the idea of death in every respect, creationist or evolutionist. In that sense, all archetypal images, which in their infinitely repetitive ceremonial parades arrive at their ironic stereotypes, actually rest upon the mythic potential of collective joy, upon a mood that celebrates life, victory over death, the confirmation of cosmic infinity against material finitude.

 

Even though it may not be of significance for this paradox (this conflict), which is in the focus of Miss Radović's focus (to avoid a pleonasm via a tautology), there is no harm in drawing attention to the fact that Eastern Christian, as opposed to Vatican-Protestant doctrine, treasures the prospect of an eschatological post-material unity as the final embrace. But, quite apart from that doctrinal antagonism, the question of death raises further questions which it is important we keep in mind, particularly when photography is at the centre of our attention.

 

It is well known that André Bazin, the creator or at least spiritus movens of the ‘politique des auteurs’ (auteur theory) and an impassioned philosopher of realism, in his study “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” cantered his discourse on the fact that the invention of the camera lens released the art of painting from the complex of realism, the obsession with verisimilitude. However, on this occasion, more important than this questionable thesis of his is his expository observation which recognises in the Egyptian tradition, in the technique of embalming and the figure of the mummy, the impulse to defy time and consequently to overcome death as a restrictive temporal unit. Furthermore, in the European tradition – in painting for instance – Bazin recognises in the idea of portraying similarity a further secularised battle for continuance which, without magic potential, will be reduced to similarity as something in which posthumous memory may place hope.

 

However, for Miss Radović's project, much more indicative is the occult dimension of embalming and, we might even say, the metaphor of the mummy – mummification, as it is sometimes called.

 

This qualmish tension (of mummification) is, in fact, covertly present in an endless myriad of these photographs, which, across various religions, cultures and races, revolve the parabolic feeling of an end before a beginning, of death before birth – the death, possibly, of cultures before they have reached their cosmic paroxysmal numbness. It is almost as if a Nietzschean Dionysian orgiastic trance were being extinguished in a Schopenhauerian apologia for self-annihilation. 

  

It is difficult to know when Miss Radović is being ironic, and when she is just witnessing the inherent ironic potentials of disintegrating rites. However, when she refers to the meta-Darwinian sarcasm of Oliver Curry, who expects a synthesis of the beautiful and the intelligent in opposition to the mentally and physically deficient, she gives to her comprehensive work a remarkable elliptical momentum, which takes us back to her basic auctorial conflict. This concerns the relationship between premeditation and intuition. For example, one of Curry’s most authoritative evolutionist transtopian precursors, Theodosius Dobzhansky, in his capital work Mankind Evolving (1962), while looking at the problems of species and races, modalities and perspectives, points out that racial hybridisation, mixed marriages or the mingling of races, has occurred whenever human races have at any time lived next to one another. Further on he says, “races are capable of exchanging genes and do exchange genes.” “Perhaps there is no recorded instance of intermarriage between some races, say of Eskimos with Papuans, but Eskimos as well as Papuans do interbreed with other races; channels however tortuous, for gene exchange exist between all human races.”

 

Well, in this comprehensive overview of pre-hybridisation rites or, at least, of rituals or their secondary, accompanying off and off-off phenomena, it seems to me there are no Eskimos or Papuans, unless I have missed them. However, the exhaustivity that the author emanates seems to be forcing us to think about the level of conceptual premeditation. On the other hand, the unrestrained diversity of motifs, details, totalities, panoramas, passages, inserts and composed, precomposed, discomposed, decomposed and non-composed vistas indicates an openness, a theatrical rapture which, although it does not necessarily disguise its roots in a romantic suffragist emancipationalism à la Clara Sipprell, captivates with its approach – ludic, in a certain sense infantile, we might even say auto-erotic; but in any case, anarchic rather than positivist, emotional rather than rational. Indeed, her approach to the idea of a wedding is quite fascinating. If we have in mind the previous, equally consistent and equally ironic sequential project of Miss Radović (A Husband in Paris), a relatively random selection of partners for a crypto-marital photo-exposure, we will see that the author is more than focused on a question that could be said to trouble her personally. This personal moment, this angle and attitude, is the way Miss Radović transcends the track she is unconsciously travelling. While she is navigating the currents of the post-conceptual renewal of photography, i.e. of the photographic camera as a tool superior to the hated easel, she enters the sphere of professional, almost professionalist effectiveness, in keeping with her acquired and inborn meticulousness, her ‘akribeia’. Her photographic perfectionism, despite the ironic texture, could, in its exhaustivity, be compared to the practical execution of a mission assigned to a military, police or judicial photo expert. This is not an objection, and it would be a misinterpretation if it were to be taken as one; since this professional competence, this agonistic perfectionism, inspired by a fundamentally serious wonder at the institution of marriage – the institution which, as we saw in Dobzhansky, is essentially meant for further evolutionary processes, i.e. posterity – blossoms forth in the mysterious sexually appealing charm of these ventures.

 

This constant wonder on the part of the author at the basic question of the human community legitimates Miss Radović as an author who breaks the mould in every sense, transcending the usual questions dealt with by both the iconodules and the iconoclasts; which means that her work in its personal identification is inimicable to systematisations related to any terminology preceding or following the aesthetic.

 

What we have here is a consequentiality, the defined world of an author and an almost fanatical preoccupation which, it would seem, might surpass the frame of the topic as well as – and even more aggressively – the frame of the medium. Even though these friezes, these metaphysical convulsions immortalised in photographs, present the paradox of a wedding in the deadliest of ways, this ironic Panopticum still seems to be crying out for its choreographic continuation. These images look as if they want to flicker towards decoding their own arcana that are presented in 24 frames per second.

 

As André Bazin once observed, “on the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language”.

 

And the impressive thing in the dialectical conflict of the intuitive and the premeditated in Miss Radović's ‘weddings’ is their petrified kinesthetics. It is precisely this implosion of frozen movement which seems to radiate all the theatrical aura of an altered reality whose self-directed ceremoniousness is in its essence amazing, so remote from its own meaning that its codification is actually equal to that of a spell, arrested at its magical and mythical pre-historic root. It is fascinating that this petrification, originating in forgotten ritual choreographies, can be deciphered without the expression of recorded movement, without film. However, I believe that a film as well as a wedding are creative inevitabilities for Miss Radović, sooner or later. But this prediction must first of all be approached through the prism of the photographer's vocation. We should keep in mind that the avant-garde as a whole, on its path from the Decadent movement, through Neo-Dada, to Post-postmodernism, etc, from Man Ray to Warhol-Morrissey and now to Katarina Radović, has superimposed its own auctorial standpoint on the medium, the craft, the manner and, if need be, the style. Because the angle comes from the standpoint, and on the angle depends the choice of lens, or camera, or …

 

I have presented here my attitude toward these magic photographs that are inviting the author to exercise her right to set them moving, to provide them with sound and to do with them whatever she pleases in her creative frenzy, without ideological, vocational, media or other prejudice or restriction. Nothing is off limits to the artist.

 


 

 

 

 

 

A Husband in Paris

 

 

by Jim Casper, editor-in-chief of online photography magazine LensCulture

 

  

Published in the catalogue of Katarina Radović's exhibition A Husband in Paris in Dom Omladine Gallery in Belgrade, December 2008

 

 

 

Despite the surface appearance of casual snapshots, this series of photographs carries powerful, unnerving, and multi-faceted subtexts. We may be amused by the audacity and playfulness of the preposterous idea that initiates each encounter. But at the same time, our amusement can quickly shift into uneasiness about the desperate measures that this situation could depict if it were real.

 

When we engage with each image, and extrapolate into the future of each potential couple, we are forced to contemplate the very real repercussions of how one’s personality and identity can be defined, altered, expanded or contracted by the personality of one’s mate (and all of his or her extenuating circumstances), as well as, in this case, perhaps chasm-like cultural differences.

 

Despite the pretext (an attractive and slightly crazy woman ‘in the hurry’ to marry someone as a ticket out of her current situation, we realize who has the power in these photographs, and perhaps who would hold the power in such a marriage. Clearly the photographer is director, actor and provocateur. Even while casting herself in the role of a woman in need, she is controlling the men who accept her proposition to pose with her in each photograph. Perhaps they are bemused, bewitched, hopeful – or merely happy to pause in their own ordinary day to surrender to a spontaneous crazy flight of fantasy. But she has cast her spell, and the results (these photographs), are brilliant.

 

Every pose has its own charge. That’s the beauty here – there is no formula. The possibility of each pairing takes its own trajectory, launching us into speculation about how one personality can transform the path of the other. What will this marriage create? And what will it cancel out? This triggers an endless series of questions that ask ‘What if…?’.

 


 

 

 

 

 

Personals

 

 

 by Paula Muhr, photographer 

 

 

Published in IMAGO Magazine on the occasion of Katarina Radović's exhibition Personals in Artget Gallery in Belgrade, December 2006 – January 2007

 

 

 

With her series of photographs Personals, Katarina Radović continues to apply the strategy of staged photography, which she has already employed in her previous work Women. Both series have certain characteristics in common: their starting points are images found in her medial surroundings (Internet, TV, magazines), and she uses herself and/or other non-professional actors to play out the (re)constructed scenes. In both cases, the author does not aim at referring to the private personae presented in the photographs or at disclosing their individual characters, but rather uses them as performers who enact general models of (frivolous) behavior to which she wants to draw the viewer’s attention.

 

In Women, she questions the ideological connotation of such images of women as are predominantly present in the mass media, by talking up the roles of various imaginary characters in front of the camera. In Personals, she directs her attention on “the phenomenon of self-advertisement – those people who send images of themselves to magazines or Internet sites, in the hope of finding a suitable partner” (K.R.). By staging fictional scenes in which she slightly exaggerates, and thereby parodies, the phenomena she presents, she uncovers their banality and yet also invests them with humour. Her images cannot be treated as a detached criticism of the consumer society in which even personal relationships became a commodity, although they do not exclude such references. She points to the stereotypes which impregnate and inform our everyday lives, yet brings it to the point where her images become affirmative in their comical potential – they represent human fragility and folly, which could be laughed at, but also emphatised with.

 

In addition to indicating sociological and psychological aspects of this specific contemporary form of looking for partners, Radović also raises the question of the ‘ideal’ portrait – or, rather of how one identifies with one’s image. The point of self-advertising lies in using the most representative image of oneself. As this image should function as an incentive for a potential future lover to enter into communication with one, it should be the one which, in the view of the portrayed individual, captures his or her most attractive and appealing features. Also, such an image, either especially made for this purpose, or chosen from the ‘archive’ of personal snapshots, expresses how the one portrayed wishes to be perceived by others. However, what remains open is how different viewers react to such images, i.e., how they read them. By staging her series of fictive personal ads, Radović investigates this very gap between the unconscious aspirations of average ‘advertisers’, which she so cleverly brings to expression in the images, and their surface appearances, which is often in collision with the viewer’s expectations. Radović plays with and parodies the spectrum of culturally coded models of representations of the desirable (and desiring) subject. Yet, her carefully staged images, with all the appropriate settings, props and costumes, retain a certain offbeat quality, resembling casual snapshots, which makes them even more poignant and attractive on the visual level.