Vesna Pavlović reviews

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Review: Vesna Pavlović’s eulogy for pictures, “Falls and Folds,” at Whitespace
July 18, 2016
ArtsATL.com
By Rebecca Brantley

For those who studied art history before the adoption of digital images in the classroom, Vesna Pavlović’s Falls and Folds, might be a nostalgic reminder of bygone days or a painful reminder of long lectures, flashcards and tests. (Art history is not, I suppose, everyone’s favorite subject.) Read More.

Art History Slides Become Art: Vesna Pavlović at Whitespace
July 8, 2016
Burnaway.org
By Jordan Amirkhani

Curator and writer Okwui Enwezor in his 2008 text “Archive Fever” states that the discourse of Institutional Critique is changing under our feet. Expanding beyond the first generations of artists associated with the institutional critiques of the 1970s and ’80s as well as the more recent manifestations of “the archival turn” or “impulse,” contemporary artists are forging new grounds by appropriating, interpreting, and interrogating archival materials and structures through the mediums of photography and film.(1) “The capacity for accurate description, [and] the ability to establish distinct relations of time and event” is both a feature of archival production as well as the photographic image—a fact that posits the photographic image as an archival object a priori, a temporal testimony between the record and the seen.(2) It is this rich relationship between image, time, and event that remains one of the most significant themes of Vesna Pavolvić’s work, and it is exciting to see how, with each presentation of her work, that theme is renewed and reconfigured. Read More.

Socialist Noir: Vesna Pavlović at Zeitgeist in Nashville
October 26, 2015
Burnaway.org
By Joe Nolan

Vesna Pavlović’s exhibition “Lost Art” finds the photographer continuing both her exploration of history—personal and national—as well as her investigation of obsolescent film technology. These are themes I’ve come to expect from Pavlović, but “Lost Art” is characterized by an unexpected sculptural sensibility that brings a welcome novelty to the proceedings, enlivening the display with the artist’s felt enthusiasm for the physicality of film. Read More.

Vesna Pavlovic’s Poetic Exploration of Media as Propaganda in Native Yugoslavia, at Whitespace
November 7, 2013
ArtsATL.com
By Harriette Grissom

Documentary film and photography can be deceptive. Film seems to capture candid moments in time, when in fact the images we see are often artful fabrications. This commingling of reality and illusion is precisely what engages audiences. Vesna Pavlovic’s “Fabrics of Socialism,” an installation on view at Whitespace through November 23, scrutinizes how these slippery qualities of film and photography lend themselves to the construction of culture. Read More.

Grinding the Individual from the Fabrics of Socialism, at Whitespace
September 7, 2013
Burnaway.org
By Andrew Alexander

What would a conversation with the past look and sound like? The new Fabrics of Socialism exhibit by artist Vesna Pavlović at whitespace is at least partly informed as a photographic and video narrative by using materials from the archives of the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade. By using black-and-white and color photographic slides and projected color video from post-World War II Yugoslavia, Pavlović inexorably draws us to contemplate what is left out of the frame, something unknowable by the participants depicted in the archives: Yugoslavia’s calamitous, violent, and genocidal breakup in the 1990s. Read More.

In Conversation: Talking Cultural Records with Vesna Pavlovic
September 11, 2013
Burnaway.org
By Karley Sullivan

I’ve wanted to talk to Vesna Pavlović since 2010, when I saw her Projected Histories exhibition at The Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.  I’ve followed her career since then, admiring the twists and expansions that she deftly applies to her study of ideologies including investigations into the archive and photographic methods.  We began talking over lengthy (and scattered) email exchanges during a month when we were both traveling.  Our written interchange culminated with a long studio visit recently on the Vanderbilt Campus in Nashville.  This interview is an abbreviation of those meandering conversations. Read More.

Vesna Pavlovic’s Photography Installation at Seed Space Takes Aim at Sight
February 14, 2013
Nashvillescene.com
By Joe Nolan

Photographer Vesna Pavlovic’s work always points back at itself and at the photographic process in general. Her interiors of Eastern European hotels resonate with references to the recent past, and what seems to be a simple photograph of a basketball game can actually be bristling with decades of political meaning and consequence. Scrutinizing Pavlovic’s subjects reveals how her actual places and faces came to be, and how they became captured images — framed photographs on a gallery wall. Read More.

Bucharest Biennale announces artists for 2012
May 7, 2012
The Art Newspaper
By Richard Unwin

“Investigative and informal approaches” dominate Scottish curator’s selection

The Scottish curator Anne Barlow has announced the 19 participating artists for the fifth Bucharest Biennale. “Tactics for the Here and Now” is due to take place from 25 May to 22 July and include the Croatian artist David Maljkovic, the French/American artist Alexandre Singh, and the American artist Jill Magid. At a press conference in February, Barlow, the executive director of Art in General, New York, said she had looked for artists, “whose agency lies less in overt statements, but rather in investigative, indirect or informal approaches that possess their own kind of power”. Read More.

At the Frist Center’s new photography exhibit, what you get is rarely what you see
Unseen Forces

June 23, 2011
Nashvillescene.com
By Joe Nolan

The Frist Center’s fetching invitation for its newest exhibits is printed in the shape of a 45 rpm record. The A-side announces Warhol Live, the music-centric blockbuster that inspired the invitation’s design. The B-side of the card announces Projected Histories, an accompanying exhibit by Vanderbilt assistant professor of art Vesna Pavlovic. Her show opens Friday in the center’s Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery. Read More.