Serial of analogue Laica and medum format photograps from 2016. and 2017. have been part of the art collection of the Museum of Fine arts in Split and has been partially published in the “Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia” book by Loose Associations, Zagrebn and Onomatopee 152, Eindhoven in 2018.

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From the the exhibition ARCHITECTURE IN CONTEMPORARY ART:

The capacity of visual arts to depict memory and time opens up exceptional possibilities for showing sedimentation of time in space. In this case, architecture becomes a platform for exploring the layers of history, yet in a way that is unburdened by scientific accuracy or linear representation of time. Freedom of artistic approach offers the possibility of an extremely active reading of the past and its connection with the present.A large group of artworks that mediate various segments of the non-verbal history of architecture and explore the possibilities of its active interpretation in the contemporary social and political constellation opens with a series of analogue photographs titled Koteks-Gripe Sports and Shopping Complex by the Split-based artist Duška Boban. Her selection of a devastated sports and shopping centre as the subject of her photographic research results from her continuing critical rethinking of space through participatory projects of Kvart, an art collective from Split, and her own activism focusing, among other things, on the neglected local architectural heritage. Boban’s critical approach is evident in her recent exhibition Split *** Stars, where she presented – besides the Koteks-Gripe Complex – that of Vila Dalmacija and the building of Dalmacijavino, whereby she added information on the construction of the said buildings, their state of conservation, and various proposals for their revitalization. However, on the formal level Boban has activated the presented spaces in a very specific way. With her “quiet”, technically and aesthetically elaborate analogue photography, she has evoked the lost time of the photographed buildings. The correspondence between the employed technique and some happier times seems to create an elusive archive in which modernity is manifested only in details such as worn-out materials, graffiti, and alike.

Jasminka Babić