The exhibition Tourist is based on the artist’s questioning of his own photograpy practices, which in this case rest on the use of tourism photography as a medium of documenting his own displacement.
The main theme revolves around questions of authenticity, the importance of visual archiving and the relationship between an individual’s identity and the visual representation of places. The project deals with the dialectics between the naïve callousness of the tourist’s experience and the use of photography techniques that are otherwise part of the artist’s “serious” artistic practice.
In this context, tourism photography reveals itself to be more than a mere documentation of travel – it becomes a means of expressing the tourist’s identity, while at the same time raising questions about his role in the process of interpreting a destination. Motifs that at first glance appear mundane and generic take on a new dimension through the subjective consideration of the tourist’s cultural background and personal motivations. It is this personal aspect, which shapes a specific narrative, that stands out as a key means of establishing a relationship towards the portrayals.
Instead of creating entirely new and purposeful visual images, the artist reflects on his own existing archive of photographs. This approach allows him to amalgamate technical precision and aesthetics with introspective reflection, where each photograph becomes both a personal statement and part of a wider dialogue with the aesthetics of mass culture. Rather than simply serving as a means of documentation, photography becomes a ritual that legitimises the experience and gives it allusive meaning.
The exhibition raises questions about the role of photography (and the visual arts in general) in the tourist’s experience, exploring differences in the perception and interpretation of universal images. The artist subtly unfolds the tension between individual (aesthetic) experience and collective notions of tourist images, while encouraging reflection on the role of the photographic medium in shaping shared interpretations.
Tim Topić (2002) works in the fields of photography, printmaking, spatial installation, sound and graphic design, which he is currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Ljubljana. His current focus of interest is memory – its conception, spatial perception and manipulation of all of the above.
He is a regular contributor to the DobraVaga Gallery and has also participated in group exhibitions at the Photon Gallery, Slovene Ethnographic Museum, Slovenian Museum of Natural History, Kino Šiška, Ljubljana City Hall and the Ponjava 4 exhibition of the Department of Photography. He has held solo exhibitions at DobraVaga, Kino Šiška, Ljubljana City Hall and the Little Gallery of the Bank of Slovenia. In 2024, he co-published the art publication Sterilni študent as part of the Kolektiv Arhiv. He won the 9th Zine Vitrine Open Call.
Curated by: Špela Pečjak
Free admission.
4. 2.–1. 3. 2025
Organization: DobraVaga / Kino Šiška.
