| Hrvoje Slovenc | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 22, 1976, Zagreb, Croatia |
| Nationality | Croatian |
| Field | Photography |
| Training | Yale School of Art (MFA) The City College of New York (BA) Zagreb University (MS) |
| Works | Home Theater Breathing in Kabwe Partners in Crime |
Hrvoje Slovenc [1](born 1976, Zagreb, Croatia) is a Croatian fine art photographer based in New York City. He holds MS in Biochemistry from University of Zagreb and MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art.[2]
His photographs have been exhibited in dozens of shows nationally and internationally including Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago[3][4], Museum of New Art in Detroit, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts [5]. Also, he is a recipient of London Photography Award, International Photography Award, Golden Light Award, Photography Now Award, BRIO Award[6], as well as Mortimer Hays-Brandeis[7][8] and Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowships.
Slovenc was part of 2011 AIM residency program at The Bronx Museum of Art. Slovenc has been a visiting artist at institutions including Drew University, The City College, and LaGuardia Community College[9].
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In the series Partners in Crime, Slovenc creates wedding portraits of long term same sex couples. Inspired by late nineteenth-century cabinet cards, Slovenc photographs these couples to appear both physically and emotionally disconnected. In conflating images of stiff, traditional marriage poses and contemporary domestic spaces, Slovenc captures the public face that society mandates for same-sex couples. For the series Breathing in Kabwe, Slovenc traveled to Kabwe, Zambia to photograph the effects of lead pollution on the local population. With photographs and text, Slovenc has transformed a typical documentary subject matter in such a way that it has become not only about the observed or the observer as individual entities, not about “us” or “them” as two very distinct cultures, but primarily about the relationship between the two. In his most recent body of work Home Theater, Slovenc photographs domestic spaces in which sadomasochistic sex acts are taking place.
Partners in Crime focuses on same-sex couples that have been living together for an extended period of time, eighteen years on average. The idea was inspired by late nineteenth-century wedding portraits and the professional techniques employed in them. While most of the earlier works were produced as cabinet cards, shot in studios with artificial backgrounds, Slovenc’s reconstructions are in color, taken in the couples' homes. The purpose is to demonstrate the mundane quality of what can only be seen as a marriage setting. In these photos, the author captures the public face that society mandates for same-sex couples. These couples appear to be both physically and emotionally disconnected because in many ways, both subtle and overt, that is how they are told they should behave. Thus in conflating images of stiff, traditional marriage poses and contemporary domestic spaces, Slovenc has sought to normalize what is still, at best, a hotly contested relationship in American society.
Funded by the Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, Slovenc traveled to Kabwe, Zambia to photograph the effects of lead pollution on the local population. In preparing for the trip, and especially during his stay there, the initial idea evolved to include not only an illustrated essay about people living in an entirely lead-tainted environment but also a deconstruction of the act of photographing the Other. Throughout the months Slovenc lived in Kabwe, he was only too aware of himself, and his own cultural positioning that constituted a very powerful filter through which he viewed things. For that reason, Slovenc invited his friend and writer Donald Mengay to join him on the trip and write a memoir of their experiences. In the actual prints, Slovenc have reproduced Mengay’s manuscript in excerpt form alongside the images. Rather than privilege either verbal or visual text as the more "authentic," i.e. closer to "reality," Slovenc showed the way in which each type of representation imparts a small, though important, perspective on what he came to decipher as "the real." Ultimately the project has become part travel journal, part interview, part documentary, part autobiography, and part revelation. In short, this project is Slovenc’s way of approaching a typical documentary subject matter in such a way that it has become not only about the observed or the observer as individual entities, not about “us” or “them” as two very distinct cultures, but primarily about the relationship between the two.
In the series Home Theater Slovenc photographs domestic spaces in which sadomasochistic sex acts are taking place. These images grew out of his personal experience in which he solicited people on numerous sex websites where he presented myself as an S&M practitioner. Even though the images are of the actual, lived-in domestic spaces, they appear to be artificial, hyperreal, grand, and with a slightly distorted perspective, as if constructed as sets for a movie or a play. To achieve that effect, Slovenc had to return to the same home a number of times, photograph different parts of the apartment, and work on scanned negatives in the post production to make the spaces look continuous. Slovenc is interested in the performative aspect of our daily lives. What particularly fascinates him is the idea of a domestic space as a "scene" in which we perform our daily routines. By photographing the homes of S&M practitioners in particular, and by contrasting the performative space with the traditional domestic space, Slovenc ultimately questions the notion of the latter as something that is spontaneously, creatively designed-or "authored"-by us as individuals. After the sadomasochistic act is over and the "performers" step into the domestic space, do we cease acting or do we merely exchange scripts? Does the traditional domestic space, then, become a performative space as well?
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL.