Jože Suhadolnik: ALBUM, Neue Slowenische Kunst

It offers a much more intimate insight into the events thus documented, revealing the photographer's own communication with individual protagonists as individuals who are otherwise fully determined by a collective attitude and mode of operation.

Jože Suhadolnik’s Album

The Album exhibition and book deliberately refuse to deal with NSK as an artistic movement, a political or ideological concept, a subject of philosophical debate or art-history criticism, a social phenomenon, or a cult.
Instead, they regard NSK as a motif. Album seeks to intrigue, not to provoke. Its aim is to present, not comment. To communicate, not illustrate. It calls for a response, but refuses to produce one of its own. It offers an experience of a visual moment in the here and now – a search for the light in noble blackness, for the colouring in black-and-white, for intimacy in public, for the individual in the collective – in short: for something in which the second cannot possibly exist without the first.

The title of the exhibition and the accompanying book Album originates in the author’s attitude to the photographs:
he sees them now, i.e. one decade after he ceased documenting the movement, from a distance, and he sees the people depicted in them, without filtering them through the lens – surprisingly – as a family. One with unusual "family" values and unconventional ties. As a circle of people who, instead of having chosen one another, were brought together by the necessity of (in this case particularly artistic) existence. As a community whose wholeness can only be preserved collectively and will, if one individual member is missing, be impaired significantly.
Suhadolnik has never followed the movement as a fan, he also did not document it so he could give himself a future status of an NSK adherent.

Regardless of this, his photographs help (intentionally or not) to mythologise the phenomenon they first recorded. That is why today it is impossible to imagine the countless publications, exhibitions and monographs about NSK which have been and will be presented to the public both locally and abroad without Suhadolnik's photographs, despite him claiming that his oeuvre of documentary photographs on this subject is not the most exhaustive. In any case, it is unmistakably auteur-oriented and, like most of Suhadolnik’s other cycles presented so far, tied considerably yet not solely to its documentary quality. It carries in itself a sharp puzzling tone, a hemmed-in sense of expectation, an anticipation of a void which, in fact, is a veristic narrative or at least the photographer's version of the world perceived through the senses. Suhadolnik's tendency for black-and-white expression is neither exclusive nor excluding, and not even coincidental – in the present cycle it is indeed indispensable. Suhadolnik is a true master of different blacknesses which in themselves open up new blacknesses of countenances, backgrounds, folds, beams, reflections. It is black and black alone that carries sufficient expressive power and aesthetics.

In terms of motifs, the photographs of Album are arranged in four sets: Laibach, Baptism under Triglav, Irwin and the last group of photos from related contexts. The exhibition is made complete by the portraits of two protagonists – Dejan Knez and Eda Čufer. It is especially Knez’s portrait whose expressiveness closely approaches what is considered an iconic image. The selection of photos also features some outstanding portrait photographs containing a remarkable degree of individualism – of both the photographer and the person portrayed. The enigmatic looks, passion of belief and again shimmering of blacknesses within a supremely purified perspective in these photographs bear witness to the fact that Suhadolnik ranks among the best Slovenian photo portraitists. Both concert and theatre photographs are intertwined with this genre, at the same time becoming (at least) a “Kunstwerk” in themselves, with poses of protagonists amid their artistic act – in particular, many of the photographs of Laibach record certain performance art shows for these very photographs. However, when the line of such photographs is cut through with simple domestic, friendly scenes, they are endowed with a sparkle blurring the border between them.

Or, as Tevž Logar put it in his text intended for the exhibition catalogue: "At first sight, the series of photographs conveys a purified horizontal route of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) movement and various manifestations of its constitutive groups, i.e. Laibach, IRWIN and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre. However, the series also presents, perhaps in a more concealed manner, the vertical route, i.e. the route showing the NSK movement as a complex phenomenon which from the outset has been dismantling the borders of visual art. What is more, it has left a significant mark on the broader cultural context and actively intervened in other social spheres. The frozen photographic images created by Jože Suhadolnik are not intended as a chronicle of the Neue Slowenische Kunst movement; they are much more images narrating stories about spaces, people and moments. And yet these very same stories will appear completely different to each viewer. After all, this is an album."

—Marija Skočir

Jože Suhadolnik: ALBUM, Neue Slowenische Kunst

The "Jože Suhadolnik: ALBUM, Neue Slowenische Kunst" exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with 59 reproductions of Suhadolnik’s photographs.