In front of the crowded stage of the Island Hotel Istra, the seventeenth edition of the biggest Croatian festival of contemporary photography – Rovinj Photodays – has officially ended with the annual awards ceremony and the Grand Prix!
Prizes were awarded in six official categories, and the works of the finalists were premiered last Friday at the group exhibition held in the Multimedia Center (MMC) Rovinj, which was the central part of this year’s festival.
Ivica Lazić, representative of Epson, as 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 for Tatiana means a new solo exhibition at the Rovinj Photodays 2025 festival , with the accompanying publication, and the festival’s cash prize in the amount of EUR 2,000 !
“Despite the fact that they grew up in the era of the expansion of digital photography, the finalists from the landscape photography category match in sensibility towards black and white photography of conceptual provenance. Applying the collage technique and combining digital photography with analog, own footage with archival material, Tatiana Takáčová takes first place with a series of imaginary landscapes whose title Might sound a little strange suggests that it is about unusual scenes. The symbioses of the real and the artificial that produce a feeling of displacement from reality. Not deviating from the soft gradation of gray tones, they evoke gloomy moods of transience.” – Sabina Salamon, president of the jury
“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, i.e. longing, melancholy or sadness that an individual feels for places he has never been to. As an artist, I interpret this concept on two levels. The first is historical, where melancholy comes to the fore because of the world, social systems and stories that have irretrievably disappeared. The second level is related to the future and the experience of an inner yearning to discover and seek the promised land.” – Tatiana Takáčová