It’s Important What Your Eyes See
In his exhibition project It’s Important What Your Eyes See (Bitno je što vaše oči vide), photographer Jaka Babnik continues his exploration of the nature of the medium of photography and visual culture in the context of various factors that determine the ways individuals perceive and consume images, which he started in Exercises in Style. Already his earlier photographic series clearly showed that his focus is on photography as a wider social and cultural practice, and on a quite conceptual approach to the existing genre and language definitions, directions, and poetics in the photographic heritage. The canon and the conventions of documentary photography that interest him in terms of their potential to expand from expression to process and reflection, articulate his photographic work as a kind of visual sociological and anthropological research on divergent social phenomena that he thematizes, ranging from the life of subcultural communities, the fate of public space in the neoliberal ideological system, sites of the manifestation of clero-political power, and symbolic representations of historic events. Also deserving of note is his work in the field of commercial photography, which has given him a different kind of insight into the dimensions of the image as a conveyor of information, communication, and messages to the public sphere and the market, and insight into the mechanisms of creation and distribution of visual content that only has one goal – to attract the viewers’ attention at any cost. Babnik’s tendency to not take the power of photography for granted, but to analyze it to identify crucial issues, has led him to reflect on its current status, especially as the world is becoming increasingly visual, and more and more is being attributed to the image with ever less knowledge to explain it and ever less ability to accept it, as he says. The absurdity of the situation has led him to consider his own position as an active contributor to the production of images and participant in the perpetuation of established visual codes and formulas that maintain the status quo in the endless flow of perceptual sensations, this dramatic complicating of our visual horizon. What it is that our eyes ultimately see is presented as a sobering distance in a group of photographic works featuring views of pieces of architecture from Babnik’s immediate environment, marked by both ordinary and bizarre human interventions that further confound our view and understanding or, conversely, make us indifferent because our eyes have become accustomed to such situations. And this is the point of departure for a series of issues that Babnik introduces as the thematic and problematic backbone of the entire project, which, as often happens in his case, extends to finding a way of articulating and installing the works in the exhibition space. With its interior spatial and architectural specifics and ambience, the exhibition space in this instance also becomes the target of the gaze, or more precisely, mental framing in the instructed movement of the viewer. Combining photographed and real site-specific situations, the artist tests visual perception itself, i.e., its codes, its saturation with experiences, knowledge, social patterns, cultural models, and ideological filters, exploring our relationship with images in everyday life, to see whether we can understand and interpret them beyond the way our view has adapted, learned, and been trained to do. This exhibition is accompanied by Babnik’s now well-recognized practice of publishing a specialized magazine, featuring contributions from collaborators, curators, theorists, critics, and artists from the region. The magazine explores the phenomenon of photography and its relations to broader socio-political and cultural contexts. –Miroslav Karić