Georg Kargl

Mladen Bizumic

The Ecology of Attention

25 Oct - 21 Dec 2019

Installation view
MLADEN BIZUMIC
The Ecology of Attention
25 October - 21 December 2019

Mladen Bizumic The Ecology of Attention continues the artist's exploration of pictorial production in the digital era by connecting two precarious phenomena - the analog photography and the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The core of the exhibition consists of a set of hand-printed photo-works installed within a wall grid made of 35 mm film canisters. By re-using the discarded photographic matter, Bizumic transforms the Georg Kargl BOX into “an architectural camera” with its“single-lens reflex mirror“ facade designed by the artist Richard Artschwager.

As a point of departure for his new series of photo-works, Bizumic visited several of the 1121 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, capturing their fragments with his analog cameras. Among other locations, the exhibition features images of the Aeolian Islands’ sea cliff near Salina; the Dolomites’ hills; the Joan Miró’s studio next to the Serra de Tramuntana, Mallorca; the Wachau Valley’s baroque wall structure, all of which are investigating the overlap of cultural and natural sites. The image of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, designed by Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss, can be seen as a concrete manifestation of the mid-twentieth-century international modernist ideology, architecture, and art.

By recalling the tradition of photo-conceptualism, Bizumic makes photo-based installations that appear like sites or scenes that await the event of their occurrence.
Paradoxically the artist’s reflection on the material process of reproduction produces an original object that mimics the shifting of index and aura of the depicted sites. Some of the works include the photographic negative collaged on top of the printed image and as such act as interfaces between overlapping moments in time and space. Bizumic sets up arrangements that are always 'works' plus their x value. The x value stands for a number of contextual factors that constitute any exhibition (location, architecture, duration, institution etc.). There is a constant tension between the works and their display, the content and the context that reveals the larger economic, historical and social framework of these images. Bizumic's practice is not about choosing one or the other but about the permanent, change of attention values. This fills space with time, opens up potentialities and creates new points of perception.
 

Tags: Richard Artschwager, Mladen Bizumic, Marcel Breuer, Joan Miró