Lovable Edmonton

“There is something magic and electric in the simple fact of choosing a subject (a place, a moment, an event, a person, things, stones, trees) and working around them, into them, picture by picture. Is it an illusion, or am I right to feel that you have only really seen something when you have fully, lovingly, sensually photographed it?” Thus spoke Fosco Maraini a photographer and ethnographer extraordinaire.

Marko makes painstaking photographic studies of empty bus stops on the route of the Bus No. 6 in Edmonton using medium and large format cameras, B&W film, and enlarging to vintage graded paper in the darkroom. Gordana colors the photos in the old coloring technique.

As recent immigrants, Gordana and Marko are trying to make the city of Edmonton their own by lovingly documenting bus stops as those urban nodes that tend to be relegated to the realm of the “infra-ordinary” – too commonplace to be noticed. This kind of prolonged, sustained, obsessive attention to detail sharpens perception and lifts the infra-ordinary into the extra-ordinary. It is ethnographic in its embrace of the Malinowskian “imponderabilia of everyday life,” and artistic in its concern with form and emotion. The inspiration for this project comes from George Perec’s Species of Spaces, Hiroshige’s 53 Stages of Tokaido, and Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards.

This work denies irony.

Photographs, plexiglass

All rights reserved, Gordana Zivkovic and Marko Zivkovic

Media Files

Contributions

Artist: Marko Zivkovic

[Bio c. 2009] Marko Zivkovic was born in Belgrade in 1961 where he went to school and graduated from Belgrade University. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently teaching at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. website: www.ualberta.ca/~zivkovic

Artist: Gordana Zivkovic

[Bio c. 2009] Gordana Zivkovic was born in Belgrade in 1964. She received her MFA from the Belgrade University of Fine arts in 2003. She is currently living and working in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Artists' Statements

Projects

Ethnographic Terminalia: Philadelphia

Ethnographic Terminalia first exhibition was a group exhibition of installation works that showed at the Ice Box gallery (Crane Arts, Philadelphia)