These photographs, with their elegantly disturbing visual beauty, explore the artificiality of contemporary world and human relationships within it. They depict objects and fantasies of erotic pleasure, lust and desire, but with certain boundaries or illusions, be they spatial or material. Acting as visual puns, these intriguing compositions are providing the observer with multiple meanings, wherein a number of strange associations may capture the imagination.

Desire (2009-2019) parodies the notions of the desirable and challenges the values of the cosy lifestyle and corporal aesthetic norms promoted by the mass media. The shiny but impermeable surfaces of plastic objects, and the palpability of plush textures, give ambivalent ideas about the stereotypes of seductive appearance and the sense of human alienation. The images from this series attempt to create a peculiar harmony between the longed-for and the accepted and between the seductive and the elusive. With reference to a number of psychological, moral and sexual ambiguities, they stand at the fragile crossroads between reality and dreams, flirting with eroticism, fetishism, advertising and consumerism. Ultimately, they offer their comment about the absurdity of the contemporary world.

Humour is one of the constants that make Katarina Radović's photographic oeuvre coherent. It is quirky, sophisticated, intelligent, and often dark, parodic humour. Laughter produced by parody is not the simple-minded, carefree laughter that can claim to have healing properties; there is something sinister – something that makes us laugh and gives us the creeps at the same time.

'Desire' disrupts the boundary between reality and fantasy. We can notice that there is no essential difference between the pair of plastic feet offered on the plush cushion and a pair of someone's feet, as an object of festishistic adoration. The comedy of the cut plastic sausage on the leash, positions us before a threatening and gaping abyss where the last foothold in normality (the boundary between the real and the imagined) sarcastically vanishes.     

Irena Šimić, art historian and Gestalt psychotherapist