Jošt Franko: Nicht Fallen, 2019
Photogaphs
Journal publication of the Nicht fallen project, 2020

>>Selection: curator Nina Popič
>>On view untill 26 May 2024

Nicht fallen represents a part of an ongoing interdisciplinary project started in 2017, that has been collecting, documenting, and depicting communities and landscapes marked and marginalized by the war in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. These images of everyday life open up themes specific to the historical and geographical reality of the region, while simultaneously testifying to the universality of recurring violence and the entrapment in conflict even after the end of the war.

The symbolic starting point of the project is a self-adhesive tape with the inscription Nicht fallen (tape that we stick on dangerous obstacles to warn us of the danger of falling), which held together a frame with the photograph of a man. In the frame, Hazira Đafić kept a newspaper clipping of her brother Merfin’s obituary, who died ten years after the war when he stepped on a mine not far from a refugee center. In the original setup at the Images of a Landscape exhibition in 2019, this frame was placed alongside photographs.

The work thematizes erased and forgotten families and individuals, refugees of the Yugoslav war, who fled to the Ježevac refugee camp in the 90s. Today, more than 20 years after the war, this collective center is still home to people who have been deprived of both their “history and future,” as Franko puts it. They have nowhere left to fall.

Through the use of archival visual material and scenes from the everyday life of people in the Ježevac refugee camp, Franko constructs a gripping story that, while tied to a specific location and situation, points to the universal tragedy of war and the fate of individuals, who have been forgotten and discarded by the system. With a minimalist aesthetic and conceptual reflection, he strings together images in series and sequences that create a sense of infinity and repetitiveness; a movement in a vicious circle. Birds – a symbol of freedom, which these individuals lack, due to both the economic conditions in which they live and the loss of formal identity – frequently appear as a leading motif in his visual language. For these people, the war has not ended; they remain trapped, both in time and space.

As If Nobody Ever Existed, a special newsprint publication produced as part of the exhibition Nicht fallen, continues the visual and textual narratives of warscarred individuals and places, which remain invisible decades after the war.

Since 2023, the work has been included in the collection of The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška.

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As part of the project “Curator’s Selection,” we present selected works from the collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška. With each selection, we aim to highlight artworks that either address current social situations or represent particularly interesting and perhaps lesser-known segments of gallery’s collection.