Andrea Palašti

"People in the Open Air" is a visual essay on the 'behavior' of photographs during World War II. It explores how the everyday functions in wartime through a selection of private and institutional photographs built around a common thread: how people positioned themselves in relation to new environments and landscapes.

Subjectively selected from the image archives of the Volkskundemuseum (Vienna, Austria), the Jewish Historical Museum (Belgrade, Serbia), the USHMM (Washington, USA), the Bundesarchiv (Koblenz, Germany), the Wiener Library (London, United Kingdom), and from the Hungarian newspaper Illustrated Sunday (Képes Vasárnap, private archive), the work also explores the dialectic between seemingly apolitical vernacular photography (individual subjectivities) and propagandistic photographs (public ideology).

Andrea Palašti (Serbia, 1984) works across artistic and curatorial boundaries, experimenting with archives and methodologies - focusing on questions of cultural geography, history and everyday life. Through her work, she is interested in knowledge exchange, questioning memory, subjectivity and identity, and the responsibilities of history.