The critical literature on the photographer Peter Hujar’s work remains relatively slight, and that of value slighter still. Most of the works are inside a high-ceilinged timber pavilion, built to exhibit wooden products made by prisoners at a forestry exhibition in. It is a reminder of botany’s proximity to imperialism, and SofijaSilvia effectively unsettles the epistemic hierarchies upon which such institutions were founded. The garden opened in 1891, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. “Pendulum” responds both conceptually and materially to this context. Its very presence at the University of Zagreb’s botanical garden is a result of the 2020 earthquake that damaged almost 2,000 buildings across the city, including the Art Pavilion, which had commissioned the exhibition and which remains closed.
Employing various deft framing and display strategies to bring together work across a range of scales-from A6 to 1.5 meters across-made between 20, “Pendulum” addresses local and global catastrophes: earthquakes, forest fires, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
She returns to loaded institutional sites-like zoos, cemeteries, botanic gardens, and museum storage units-but also places in which aesthetics are more subtly constructed-nature reserves, managed woodlands, and the private retreat of a Communist dictator. SofijaSilvia’s photography touches upon those tender, knotted moments when care for the more-than-human becomes almost inseparable from a politics of domination and control.
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