Photojournalist Jovica Drobnjak started a peculiar side-project in 2011: he set off to photograph graffiti in Zagreb whose content was related to Zdravko Mamić. In six years that have passed, he amassed a couple of thousand photos, a number that Drobnjak himself sees as proof that Mamić became a locus in the public space. He’s ever-present from the suburbs to the centre, slowly finding its way into collective consciousness in these parts.
309 photos depicting resentful anti-Mamić statements are on display; the repeated messages leave a surreal impression when presented all in one place, in front of the viewer. The author noted that neither the exhibition nor the project are aiming to intice public hate towards Mamić – to be fair, the public doesn’t really need help with that – but to serve as a document of a certain time period.
Most of featured graffiti look like hastily scribbled short slogans and were sprayed on randomly selected public property: walls, sides of various buildings, doors of public toilets, bus stations, train stations. Apart from touching on the subject of vandalism, because none of the inscriptions come anywhere near an elaborate work of street art, the project shows another ugly occurrence in our society: hate towards anyone who’s different. You see, the urban vandals’ prevailing strategy to offend Mamić is to call him names according to categories of people they think of as worthless, so the guy often gets called a Serb, a faggot, or a gypsy. The colourful language points to a large part of the population united against an untouchable powerful public persona, choosing to express their dissatisfaction by casually hating on some marginalised opressed groups along the way.
Titled “Paints and varnishes” (Boje i lakovi), the exhibition makes you think more than you would expect, considering it’s composed of hundreds of similar images that aren’t aesthetically pleasing. The intention may have been to document, but the result turned out to be quite provoking as well.
The exhibition is on display in Greta gallery until May 12th.
