Tuesday, 22 April 2025.
19.00 OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION
(22.04–17.05.2025)
→ Artget Gallery, The Republic Square 5/1
Belgrade, the city where Marlies Vujović moved to in the 1960, from the very beginning and in many ways reminded her of her native Hamburg. Wide and powerful rivers, greenery and parks that permeate the city all the way up to Kalemegdan and the confluence, a boom in architecture and construction after the devastating war years, the birth of new parts of the city with bold buildings packed into well-designed urban concepts.
With the twin lenses of her Rolleiflex camera, she begins to record everything that catches her attention in her new surroundings. Construction sites, completed buildings and units in New Belgrade, single-family residences in the first blocks, atriums and terraced loggias of the Block 45, the lamella of the elegant Hotel Yugoslavia, the Fontana Shopping Center, the old Mercator, Centrotekstil, the SIV building, the complex of the just-completed fairground and Sava center, Belgrade hotels, the impressive 25th of May center with the lighthouse-shaped tower, sports centers, theaters, museums, squares, fountains and parks, architectural gems in Kralja Petra Street, Art Nouveau and much more.
The lens reveals what is otherwise hidden and inconspicuous, details of facades, reliefs, materials and colors, windows and entrances to buildings. In her photos, Belgrade is a living city, children on playgrounds in front of newly built schools and kindergartens, squares and parks with pedestrians, restaurant gardens with packed tables, rafts, War island and Ada, colorful and crowded stalls at Zeleni Venac or some other Belgrade market.
In order to photograph the Pobednik (the ‘Victor’) monument on Kalemegdan fortress, who looks over the Sava river and observes the expansion of New Belgrade, Marlies Vujovic patiently waits for the autumn colors of the leaves, the composition of the clouds in the sky, in order to make her iconic slide that fills books and posters to this day. Her extremely large, extensive and thematically diverse collection of professional photographs of Belgrade and the entire former Yugoslavia, made without retouching or Photoshop, is a witness to a moment from the exuberant times of the 60s, 70s and 80s.
