A Photographic Dialogue with the Past: Mara Bratoš Reveals
An exhibition at the Otok Gallery presents a parallel view of Dubrovnik from 1995 and 2025, exploring how spaces of memory and everyday life have changed.
An exhibition at the Otok Gallery presents a parallel view of Dubrovnik from 1995 and 2025, exploring how spaces of memory and everyday life have changed.
The Otok Gallery, located within the Art Workshop Lazareti, becomes a meeting point of two eras on Monday, August 11 at 9 PM. Young artist Mara Bratoš, a student at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Art (Film and TV directing), opens the exhibition "Hidden Places of the City," which will be on view until September 1.
The exhibition places photographs taken exactly thirty years apart in direct dialogue. The first series of black-and-white images dates from 1995, a period immediately after the Homeland War, while the new color photographs were taken in 2025. Through this temporal contrast, the artist explores how spaces, memories, and the relationship of residents to places that were once part of everyday life have changed.
Instead of the usual tourist sights, Bratoš, even as a student, aimed her lens at hidden, lesser-known corners of the city. Her photographs from 1995 capture spaces between the public and the forgotten-places that have lost their original function but remain etched in the collective memory of Dubrovnik's residents.
The black-and-white images exude an almost cinematic atmosphere-empty, quiet, and shrouded in the spirit of the time. Among the locations she captured are Villa Šeherezada, Hotel Argentina, Villa Elita and Villa Wolff in Lapad Bay, the water polo court at Porporela, and the table tennis tables in front of Hotel Neptun. The wartime destruction was still visible, and it was precisely such spaces that drew her attention.
Three decades later, the artist returned to the same locations. However, she found a significantly different reality. Some places are no longer accessible, access to certain spaces is restricted, and some have completely changed their purpose. This very transformation becomes a key part of the exhibition's narrative.
The photographs from 2025 are not mere repetitions of old shots but a testament to the passage of time and the changing relationship to space. The exhibition thus raises questions about memory, the identity of the City, and transformations that occur not only on facades and streets but also in the way residents perceive former communal places.
By combining post-war black-and-white photography with contemporary color shots, Mara Bratoš presents two parallel Dubrovniks. One is a city recovering from wartime destruction, and the other is a city in constant flux. "Hidden Places of the City" is thus not only a document of urban change but also a story about time, memory, and spaces that are slowly disappearing from everyday view, yet are preserved precisely through the medium of photography.
