Augenblick , Profile : Dubravka Vidovic at European Photography Festival

Croatian Dubravka Vidović is an artist ranging from Installation to Photography. She is currently exhibiting at the "Incanto" at the European Photography 2010 in Reggio Emilia (Italy) curated by Elio Grazioli and Gigliola Foschi, presenting her series of photos realized during a travel in India, in Rajasthan, that compose an imaginary landscape where the main element is water and coloured plastic buckets in a hostile sorroundings. She have worked on the images before taking the shots, arranging installations that transfigure the world in a poetic, playful deliberately utopian way. Landscape is not only a objective phenomenon, but a new and personal place.
"She set out the containers directly into the Rajastan landscape, she chose some places, and then arranged plastic buckets to create a figurative composition, and at the same time they become elements of her story about the water. They appear like silent colorfull points among a field surrounded by ruins; they hang like unlikely fruits from a feathery tree in the desert; they invade a half-destroyed shelter, surrounded by the Pespi logo; they take the place of the elements of an old watermill. They seem to wait the rain, or to be brought to a spring to “water”. There is a dry poetry in these pictures that are telling about the essence of life, about its fragility and its hardness. In the care for humility of the things, even the poorest as the more anonimous, Dubravka catches the birth of the shape with a steady hand, to photography and drawn it. Through the living landscapes of the boxed sea and these installations in the nature, the connection with art appears: to represent the real and its invisible relations with the perception, to identify a shape to grasp the experience of the world and its perpetual transformation."
Curator Francesca Pasini for solo show "Boxed Sea" at Gallery Artopia in MilanHere the statement presentation of the exhibition written from curator Gigliola Foschi:
"The images do not deny reality, nor do they remove the pain of it, but they are able to capture things differently in that they are sustained by the need to be fuelled by imagination, hope and engaged attention. In the works of the authors displayed at this exhibit there are no flights towards gratuitous worlds of the imagination. Reality is there, before their eyes, but it is given renewed vibrancy by the affective or imaginary dimension of their way of looking at it. Through extremely diversified visual or design strategies, with the power to effect a kind of sideways shift or displacement of what we normally see, the works become spaces of discovery and enchantment in which reality no longer appears in its “opaqueness”, but opens up to a hidden and evocative dimension instead. Some of the authors have worked on the images before taking the shots, arranging performances or installations that transfigure the world in a poetic, playful or deliberately utopian way. Others use a close up shot or a view dilated in time to transform fragments of reality (a donkey's face, a ship model in a bottle, a simple room, a landscape, an old photograph) into mysterious apparitions or presences suspended in time, stirring the viewer's imagination."