Herzlich Willkommen Im Hyatt Hotel, Belgrad, April 1999
Produced during the 1999 US-NATO bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia, while working on a journalistic assignment for Die Zeit magazine, images from the Hotel Hyatt Belgrade present the tranquil life of a hotel in the war zone, occupied by the foreign media. In a documentary sense, those photographs capture the leisurely activities of Serbian Nouveau Riches and the foreign media representatives who were residing at the Hotel during that time. In a war ran entirely like a video game, with precise action, Hyatt Hotel clearly was not a target. In the “On Normality, Art in Serbia, 1989-2001” Branislav Dimitrijević writes that [Hyatt photographs] “took an ironic approach on what we consider the “normality” in Belgrade during those times. They brought an equally relevant “truth” about the war. They were not the other side of the reality. They were the reality itself. Such an event becomes visualized as a “quarantine strategy”, in which attitude becomes cynicism, rather than empathy towards the war. The greatest allies of Serbia during that “quarantine strategy” were the representatives of foreign media themselves, and the relativism of the developed world.
