TONE STOJKO | IL CORPO LUDICO

TONE STOJKO

The Body in Play

17. 12. 2011–19. 01. 2012

Opening on Saturday, 17th december  2011 at 6. pm

With his superb press, theatre, portrait and artistic photographs shot during a creative career spanning more than four decades, Tone Stojko ranks among the most outstanding exponents of Slovenian photography. A 25-year career as a photo-journalist and photo editor at Mladina, 300,000 theatre photographs, over 32,000 faces immortalised by his camera, some 1,500 theatre and dance performances captured in moving images along with his underwater recordings – the artist’s most recent passion – is a body of work which is impressive not only in numerical terms but encompasses some of the most recognisable images of the key moments in Slovenia’s political history, the icons of creativity impressed in the cultural past, and superbly documented stage performances of Slovenian theatre companies. Stojko acts as the key chronicler of images of our time, yet what gives a special character to each of those images is the artist’s ability to communicate a more profound message contained in the situations and people he photographs.

The Body in Play exhibition put on in the Jakopi? Gallery gives an insight into his most recent creative production involving 75 colour photographs of female nudes in movement which sometimes subtly even cross the borders of abstraction. The photographer achieves this with a skilful stroke of his camera. In thematic terms, Stojko looks as far back as to 1974 when a cycle of his photographs bearing the same title first gives birth to the idea of blurring a female body’s moving figure – the present exhibition also involves eight black-and-white photographs from the said cycle. At the time of their creation, Andrej Medved wrote: “In movement, dance, ecstasy the body-and/as-play is shown, the body in play, which is simultaneously truth and appearance, that is to say, the whole truth as the abyss and fullness, chaos and order, neatness and disarray of play.”