Nikola Petković (1958) is one of the key figures of Rijeka’s punk and new wave scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, although he is not remembered as a musician. Quite the opposite: as time has passed, the significance of his role has only become more apparent. Instead of a musical instrument, Petković held a camera. His way of being present, best summed up by the phrase “he was always somewhere around”, placed him in the role of a documentarian without whose work it would be difficult today to reconstruct that heroic period of the local alternative culture. Moreover, as in the best stories of this kind, the importance of his work was already evident at the time. Petković absorbed the poetic and aesthetic impulses characteristic of the punk and new wave scene, but filtered them through his own sensibility, shaping them through a distinctive photographic language and, in turn, helping to define the scene visually. This is vividly demonstrated by posters for Rijeka rock bands built around his photographs, as well as by promotional materials and record covers featuring his work. Never on stage, always in the half-light that offered a view both of the stage and of everything happening around it, Petković emerged through his work as an invisible master of the visible. In other words, what we see in his photographs today shapes our perception of an important chapter in local pop culture. That is something that can be said only of the key protagonists of a particular period in cultural life.
The exhibition presents around sixty photographs and is on view from 23 January to 28 February 2026.
