Mortar and Pralines

"Food in Context": A Serbian artist, Andrej Tisma, has shown pictures of enjoyment and transience at two exhibitions, in the Villa Ichon and at the City Library of Bremen.
Firm stuffed peppers next to torn clothes, a platter of roast meat in contrast with plastic garbage bags, pralines in close proximity to crumbling mortar. These pairs of Andrej Tisma's photographs could be viewed as a message about social inequality or they could be understood in a general way as illustrations of the contrast between light and shadow in human existence. However, if we leave behind the first impulse of the photographs and our own reflexive reaction to their narrative contents, other similarities will strike us. The formation of sweets is similar to the model of putting together the granite slabs of the pavement, the structure of the grill finds its equivalent in the waste basket.

Things share similarities much more than one would think at first glance. They are manifested in different aggregate conditions or, differently put, in different moments. Decomposition and final disposal of leftovers is already lurking behind the tempting-looking foodstuffs. Tisma lures us with the glamorously laid table and then reverts our attention to garbage and disintegration. Formal binding hides an existential message. Entire life is aimed at finality and disintegration. "Food in Context", the title of Tisma's series of photographs exhibited in the Villa Ichon and at the City Library of Bremen, in the medium of digital prints, is a continuation of the classical contents of the "Vanitas" still lives.

Rainer Bessling
Kreiszeitung, Syke, October 11, 2011