In front of an audience of peers at Island Hotel Istra, the seventeenth edition of Croatia’s largest contemporary photography festival, Rovinj Photodays, officially concluded with the grand award ceremony and the presentation of the Grand Prix!
Awards were given in six official categories, and the works of the finalists were premiered last Friday at a group exhibition held at the Multimedia Center (MMC) Rovinj, which was the central part of this year’s festival.
Ivica Lazić, a representative of Epson, one of the main sponsors of the festival, awarded the Grand Prix to Tatiana Takáčová, a visual artist and photographer from Slovakia and the winner in the Landscape category. Winning this award means a new solo exhibition for Tatiana at the Rovinj Photodays 2025 festival, an accompanying publication, and a cash prize of 2000 EUR!
“Despite growing up during the expansion of digital photography, the finalists in the landscape photography category share a sensitivity towards black and white photography of a conceptual nature. By applying collage techniques and combining digital photography with analog, their own shots with archival material, the first place goes to Tatiana Takáčová with a series of imaginary landscapes titled It Might Sound a Little Odd, indicating unusual scenes. A symbiosis of the real and artificial produces a sense of displacement from reality. Not deviating from the soft gradation of gray tones, they evoke gloomy moods of transience.” – Sabina Salamon, jury president
“This project reflects my long-standing interest in the psychological aspects of human experience and the concept of temporality. The ideological starting point is the German concept of fernweh, a longing, melancholy, or sadness an individual feels for places they have never been. As an artist, I interpret this concept on two levels. The first is historical, where melancholy arises from the world, social systems, and stories that have irretrievably vanished. The second level is connected to the future and the experience of an inner longing for discovery and searching for the promised land.” – Tatiana Takáčová