Fedor Vučemilović
Fedor Vučemilović has worked as a documentarist and photojournalist as well as with fine art photography and with conceptual artistic practices that reflect on the photographic medium. From 1975 to 1978, Vučemilović was an active member of the Group of Six Artists together with Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, and Vlado Martek as well as Mladen and Sven Stilinović, with whom he helped shape the “New Artistic Practice” movement in former Yugoslavia. In this context, Vučemilović documented the exhibition-actions by the Group of Six. He also became a portraitist of the entire Croatian art intelligentsia
plus visitors such as Ulrike Rosenbach and Achille Bonito Oliva. Their portraits by him now serve as an important document of a historical era while also forming an autobiographical record for the artist himself. They are significantly entitled “Photos from the Exhibition” (1975–1982). Alongside his purely photographic work, Vučemilović has also been active as a director of photography and as a filmmaker whose output has included video clips documenting Zagreb’s alternative scene. The essence of Vučemilović’s photographic output questions the medium as a justifiable unit representing truth versus being a means of adding value to but not representing history itself. Segments of time or the framing thereof constitute fundamental elements of the photographic paradigm at his disposal while also creating narratives or split-second manifestations of reality. Vučemilović’s individual work is concerned with explorations of the self vis-à-vis the other in mainly urban settings, adhering to (as Miško Šuvaković has put it) a post-avant-garde or post-minimalist rhetoric. Hence, the artist has explored all possible means by which to approach time-based forms of existence offered by the photographic apparatus. W.S.
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