Ivan Petrovic
UNDERGROUND SHELTERS
The Underground Shelters series of photographs was initiated in 2002 in the Netherlands as part of the Civilians in Uniform project, where shelters in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht were photographed. The commenced work continued throughout 2003 and 2004, initially in Serbia (Belgrade, Kruševac) and Austria (Vienna, Eisenstadt, Graz), and subsequently in Germany in 2011 (Regensburg).
“Petrović approaches the underground shelters as sites of urban archaeology, translating them into a photographic image where the material remains of failed Modernist visions of progress intertwine with the infrastructural traces of Cold War military paranoia. In these subterranean spaces, which become the subject of his photographic inquiry, collective notions of security, survival, and the possibility of sustaining life amidst destruction are inscribed. Although typologically uniform and technically utilitarian, the shelters in Petrović’s work emerge as multifaceted symbols of an era: at once relics of past catastrophic imaginaries and reflections of a present world living once again under a horizon of uncertainty and fear of mass destruction.“
“In Petrović’s photographic work, the underground shelters are transformed from architectural spaces of protection into sights of political and civilizational fragility, functioning simultaneously as visual manifestations of contemporary anxiety. What was once concealed beneath the surface—the infrastructure of fear and survival—becomes visible in his photographs, exposing the tensions between technological rationality and existential powerlessness in the face of global crises. The aesthetic of dereliction, marked by traces of erosion, disuse, but also by the new employment and repurposing of the shelter spaces, becomes a means of critically reflecting on a society situated in a paradoxical synthesis of progress, fear, and isolation; a society living in a state of permanent anticipation of catastrophe. In this regard, these photographs function as a testimony to an epoch where the end of the world is no longer imagined as an event, but as a permanent condition.”
“[„ The modern ruin—the industrial ruin, the defunct image of future leisure (the vacant mall or abandoned cinema), or the specter of Cold War dread—is in fact always, inevitably, a ruin of the future. And that future seems, retrospectively, to have taken over the entire twentieth century: all of its iconic ruins (…) now look like relics of lost futures, whether utopian or dystopian .”] Dillon’s formulation opens one of the key dimensions for interpreting Petrović’s Underground Shelters, in which the contemporary ruin no longer signals the decay of the past, but the erosion of an imagined future. “
“ At the beginning of 2026, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the symbolic Doomsday Clock had been advanced to 85 seconds to midnight. This metaphorical scale—a device for measuring the degree of global precarity and the potential for humanity’s self-destruction—has never registered closer to “midnight,” the moment of the world’s imagined end. The Clock was inaugurated in 1947 by scientists of the Manhattan Project (including figures such as Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer) to function as a crucial indicator of global instability and fragility of our civilization. This year’s decision to move its hands forward signals the convergence of multiple contemporary threats: from the specter of nuclear conflict and global warfare, through climate change and extreme natural events, to the risks inherent in the misuse of artificial intelligence and the potential emergence of new pandemics.”
“Within the context of a (re)established, and seemingly continuously renewed state of catastrophe preparedness, which has persisted since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019, Ivan Petrović’s photographic project Underground Shelters confirms its actuality and acquires an additional layer of critical significance. This series, created over a ten-year period (2002–2011) across multiple cities in Europe, reads today not merely as an archive of past threats and fears, but as a layered visual commentary on the contemporary condition of permanent crisis.”
From Ana Ereš’s text “Chronotopes of Catastrophe”
