The photography exhibition “Under the Auspices of Kairos” by Branka Kopecki will be officially opened on Monday, June 17 at 7:00 PM at the Roman Petrović Gallery in Sarajevo. The exhibition is part of the 16th BHAAAS Days in Bosnia and Herzegovina conference program, and the works will be on view to the public until July 17, 2025.
This poetic series of photographs was created during an art residency on an Adriatic island and explores the concept of Kairos — an immeasurable time of inner presence, sensation, and the depth of the moment.
Member of BHAAAS, Branka Kopecki is a photographer and visual artist whose work blends the documentary with the contemplative, always in search of quiet, unnoticed moments that shift our perception of the everyday.
You are warmly invited to the opening and to a visual journey through the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary.
"During an art residency in 2024 on an Adriatic island, in a small village surrounded by vineyards, nature, and the elements of everyday life untouched by the fast pace of modern living (the tourist invasion, the buzzing of mobile phones, the hum of crowds and the pressure of contemporary life), the idea for the project Under the Auspices of Kairos was born. The project aims to use photography to evoke the power of moments that are both banal and, in every way, extraordinary. Those that leave a mark on our lives and transform our perception of time. Moments that carry a taste, a scent, a color — whose images follow us through life, emerging before our eyes without clear temporal or spatial cues, carried by the unpredictable rhythm of the mysterious Kairos.
Unlike Chronos — time that is measurable, quantitative, and linear — Kairos (Καιρός) is metaphysical time, implying emotion, memory, and the rare sensation of heightened awareness of a single moment that confronts us with the complex structure of existence. It is the time that opens a dimension between “before” and “after,” a deep recognition of an exceptional moment that, at first glance, belongs to ordinary everyday life. Kairos time cannot be measured — it is lived as the layered experience of a fragment and its depth.
By exploring that which escapes our attention in the eternal flow of time — those things we often overlook — my aim is to distance the viewer from the traditional perception of photography as a mere imprint of reality. Instead, I want to bring them closer, through my contemplative experience, to the true essence of the image — the precise moment of its creation. At the same time, I hope to inspire viewers to seek their own steps into an intimate temporal dimension of the exceptional through the lens of my memories.
Art exists precisely because of humanity’s eternal search for the exceptional, which enriches our lives — despite the fact that it is often the banalities of everyday life that most frequently inspire art. Because the exceptional cannot exist without the ordinary. What one person lacks is the object of another’s desire. The extraordinary and the banal have no meaning on their own — until, in a fraction of a second, time stops because a miracle has happened in our gaze.
Branka Kopecki
English
Bosanski
