The retrospective exhibition of the photographer Goranka Matić “Art in the crowd” will be opened on Tuesday, June 13, at 7 p.m., in the Montenegrin art gallery “Miodrag Dado Đurić” in Cetinje, organized by the National Museum of Montenegro and the Museum of Contemporary Art from Belgrade.

After a great success in Belgrade, and touring around the region, the exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art from Belgrade in 2021 will be presented to the Montenegrin audience. The exhibition “Experience in the crowd” represents the first comprehensive (re)presentation of the work and achievements of Goranka Matić, who has been present on the art and photography scene for forty years. From the very beginning, in the eighties of the last century, the work of Goranka Matić ran parallel in the domains of newspaper, reportage and artistic photography. The duality and differentiation within her professional engagement – ​​as, on the one hand, a newspaper chronicler of musical, artistic and political events and, on the other, a dedicated art photographer – contributed to a complex author’s oeuvre. Hence the name of this retrospective exhibition – Experience in the crowd, whose intention is precisely to name the process of Matićeva’s work unpretentiously, somewhat poetically. Although the topics and genres differed depending on engagement and the nature of interest, this did not affect Matić’s creative position but, on the contrary, on the uniformity of the visual and semantic approach, which is reflected above all in the author’s equally clear concentration on both people and to events and situations.

Matić’s professional engagement as a photographer came spontaneously, and everything was accompanied by a large dose of personal curiosity and courage, and also a tendency towards a certain type of activism, the desire to act during important cultural and social events, not only as a photographer on assignment and an observer, but as an active participant. Photographing in the crowd of the current moment, whether it was rock concerts in the 1980s or political protests in the 1990s, enabled Matić to convey in an authentic way the drama of events and the psychology of an individual, but also to adapt her poetics to contemporary movements in photography and art at the time.

The exhibition “Experience in the crowd” presents the author’s work in over five hundred photographs and materials of a different nature (archives, documentation, photo-essays). The exhibition at CGU “Miodrag Dado Đurić” will be structured somewhat differently, but with the same, already established conceptual units: First author’s exhibitions and works realized in the medium of photography; photos of rock concerts and protagonists of the new wave together with actors of the art scene created in the eighties, the center of which was the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade (rock photos, lifestyle of actors of the rock and art scene, design of music album covers); portraits (artists, directors, writers, politicians, etc.); 10 years against (photographs from political gatherings, manifestations and protests in Belgrade 1990–2000) and artistic projects (Moravice projects, Matrilineal mirror, Memorabilia, Portraits with female friends, Scars).

Goranka Matić is a sort of chronicler of events on the artistic, cultural, social and political scene. Her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art was very successful precisely because it could be interpreted independently of authorship and treated as a problematic exhibition that provides an insight into the social and cultural circumstances of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia and Belgrade, from the beginning of the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. In addition, the exhibition “Experience in the crowd” indirectly aims to point out the dynamic and multiple positions and roles of the medium of photography.

The author of the concept and curator of the exhibition is Una Popović, senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, while the coordinator and curator of the exhibition at the National Museum of Montenegro is Mirjana Dabović Pejović, manager of the Art Museum of Montenegro.

After the opening, on June 13 at 7 p.m., an expert guide through the exhibition will be organized. The exhibition will last until July 31, 2023.

Goranka Matić was born in 1949. She completed her art history studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. Since 1971, she has been a permanent associate of the Student Cultural Center as one of the editors of the art program and curator of the gallery “Srećna nova munesta”. From 1978 to 1980, she ran “Gallery 45” in New Belgrade.

He has been actively engaged in photography since 1980. She started her professional career in the magazine Juboks, then Start, Svijetu. Her photos were published in almost all the leading magazines of the former Yugoslavia (Duga, Politika, Omladinske novine, Beorama, Ritam, Liberation, Polet, (New)Moment, Delo). She was a photo editor in the weekly Vreme (1990–2006), in the daily newspaper Politika (2006–2010) and on Radio and Television of Serbia (2011–2015). During the eighties, her work in the field of rock photography was most significant, especially within the informal movement called the new wave. That’s when some of the iconic album covers of the leading musicians of that period were created (Idoli, U skripcu, Bajaga i instruktori, Đorđe Balašević, etc.). In addition, her photographic opus also contains portraits of artists, writers, directors, actors (people from the artistic and cultural scene), as well as politicians, taken for election and various other types of campaigns. She is the author of numerous photographs with socio-political themes created during the turbulent nineties.

She taught at the Faculty of Political Sciences and the Faculty of Media and Communication in Belgrade (photo-journalism and documentary photography).

The first woman photographer is a member of the photo section of ULUPUDS.

During her artistic career, she participated in numerous collective and independent exhibitions in the country and abroad. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. She is the winner of several important awards.