“Beograd Concrete” it’s the result of an artistic residency in Belgrade, Serbia, as part of Belgrade Photo Month 2021, during which Inês d’Orey created a photographic series involving the modernist and brutalist architecture present in this region of the world. The concept of the identity that architecture imprints on a given territory is a constant in the artist’s work, which she has previously explored in other cities such as Lisbon, Porto, Copenhagen, and Tokyo.

In the case of Belgrade, Inês d’Orey was particularly interested in the mixture of architectural styles and references she encountered in the city, where public buildings constructed between 1946 and 1980 intersect with other buildings dating from the First World War, when Yugoslavia was formed.

Inês d’Orey’s photography, as a language filled with its own signs and symbols, derives from space as an architectural object and returns to it shortly thereafter. There is a kind of suspension of time in a changing place, a repository of a “patine” that seems to crystallize this moment of temporary absence of human presence. We thus anticipate that these are inhabited—or rather lived-in—places, walked through, within a time that resumes, setting history in motion. — Ana Matos, in Room sheet.