The exhibition of photographs and video works by Stefana Savić, titled “This Is Not the Place”, was formally opened at the Gallery of the National Museum Kraljevo, on Tuesday, December 11th, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. The audience was welcomed by Ljubiša Simović, museum advisor of the National Museum Kraljevo. As one of Savić’s closest collaborators and long-time connoisseurs of her work, Simović delivered an inspired address that combined personal memories, theoretical insights, and reflections on the nature of photography and the artistic search for “place” .
He reminded the audience that the gallery has been a space for art and culture for three decades, one of the most important local venues dedicated to visual art. Simović recalled his own participation in exhibitions there thirty years ago, which helped shape the artistic scene of Kraljevo at the time. Although, as he noted, “this is no longer that place, just as we are no longer who we once were”, the continuity of the space testifies to the persistence of culture despite social circumstances.
Introducing the exhibition, Simović reflected on his first encounter with Stefana Savić, describing her as a “wonder child” whose interest in photography was evident from an early age. He recalled how she carried a camera instead of jewellery, patiently recording places in Kraljevo that seemed unremarkable or invisible to passersby, yet for her were inexhaustible sources of meaning – moments where “time stops and becomes timeless”. He emphasized her unique visual sensitivity, her ability to uncover layers of meaning in the “ordinary”, and to capture with photography the meeting point of past, present, and future.
Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between “hot” and “cool” media, Simović noted that photography, as a medium rich in information, often resists deeper interaction with the viewer. The challenge for the artist, he argued, is to “cool” photography – stripping away excess detail to invite active participation and interpretation. Stefana has long pursued this approach, choosing frames that are visually simple yet open, encouraging viewers to complete the image with their own emotions, memories, or questions. Her work moves beyond documentary, opening space for philosophical reflection on place as experience.
For this exhibition, Savić selected works from her extensive archive, ranging from early analog photographs to contemporary digital images, creating a thematic whole that questions the idea of place, recognition, and our relationship to space. Each photograph is a captured moment in which a place is displaced from its usual context, frozen in time yet open to countless interpretations. The exhibition title, “This Is Not the Place”, thus becomes an invitation to reconsider what place means and how we recognize it.
Simović also reflected on the limitations of critical language, invoking Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to suggest that formal criticism cannot fully capture the intuitive layers of artistic work. He added a poem of his own to the exhibition catalogue, believing that poetic language can reach where critical discourse falls short.
He concluded by recalling the importance of tradition, referencing exhibitions by Lazar Vozarević and Milan Konjović in the same space during the 1990s, which demonstrated that tradition is neither banal nor decorative, but requires sensitivity and authenticity. In this context, he emphasized that Stefana continues her creative path with the same subtlety and measure, achieving “much with little”.
The exhibition “This Is Not the Place” was officially declared open, with an invitation to the audience to embark on their own search for the meaning of space, moment, and image.
At the close, Stefana Savić herself briefly addressed the attendees, expressing gratitude to the National Museum Kraljevo for its support, to Ljubiša Simović for his collaboration, and to the audience for their presence and interest.