DREAMS OF REALITY by Ivan Blazhev
DREAMS OF REALITY
Photography exhibition by Ivan Blazhev
Less than a hundred years ago, in the whirlwind of Dadaism, in Western Europe gradually began to crystallize new artistic movement, which will leave a tremendous legacy in almost all arts of the XX century – surrealism. One of the ideals of this movement, as defined in the First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 was the desire and the need to find the miraculous in everyday life. In the banality of reality to discover those seemingly ordinary things, that will turn that same reality into a miracle and simultaneously will transcend it to a higher level. The ideal of the Surrealists was not the sensation of this new reality to be strictly opposed to everyday reality. On the contrary, they tried to prove that life itself, seemingly ordinary, hides magic that is all around us. Just enough for а moment to open the “doors of perception” of those small wonders of existence to be seen from the new perspective.
Ivan Blazhev (1974) is a photographer who in terms of photographic style or poetics is not close to the experiments of the authors who tried, mostly by means of photo-manipulation and photomontage, in their work to create new experiential or sensory reality. But he is very close to that surrealist sensibility to look for the miraculous in everyday life, to search for outbursts of seemingly ordinary life, which viewed from a different, specific perspective, give us a new vision of what is our daily life. He as a photographer is an obsessive seeker of the poetic in everyday life, a poetic that comes to the fore not as something that opposes and denies reality, but rather stems from it, essentially and inherently belonging to her.
These aspects particularly dominate both projects presented on this occasion, “Macedonia Dreaming” and “Texture of life”.
In front of Blazhev’s photographs we are faced with captured views, diverse fractured perspectives, which yet again tell the story of the world as a great miracle, beautiful because it can give us the opportunity to be astonished by it. And that is the greatest beauty of these photographs – that allow us to once again amaze our view of the world that surrounds us.
(excerpt from the text by Vladimir Jankovski on Blazhev’s photographs)
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Biography:
Born in Skopje, Macedonia in 1974. Holds a BA degree in Filmmaking from Brooklyn College and a MFA degree in Photography from the Academy of Arts of Novi Sad.
Works as a freelancer photographer and photography educator. He has exhibited his work at national and international museum and gallery venues. In 2008 his project Macedonia Dreaming was part of the Beyond Walls – Eastern Europe after 1989 program at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in the Netherlands.
Blazhev published five photographic books. His work is distributed by Anzenberger Agency.
