April 10, 2007
Mladen Bizumic: How If – A Translation in III Acts
A 'Spatial Opera'
Mladen Bizumic: How If – A Translation in III Acts :: 29 March – 28 April 2007 :: Finissage April 27, 19.00 :: PROGRAM: initiative for art + architectural collaborations, Invalidenstrasse 115, D-10115 Berlin :: t: +49 (0)30 39509318 :: in collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bethanien.
PROGRAM – initiative for art + architectural collaborations presents ACT III of the exhibition How If – A Translation in III Acts by New Zealand artist Mladen Bizumic. Bizumic's first solo exhibition in Germany is structured as a ‘spatial opera’ in which he explores the facets of contemporary geopolitics in relation to representations of architecture. In each of the piece’s three acts, we find the contribution of other artists, musicians, theorists and in one instance, his mother. Act III is presented at PROGRAM, while ACT I & II form the installation at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.
Bizumic’s work is often based on the architecture, urban context and history of the space in which he is living. How If - A Translation in III Acts activates Berlin, his current abode, as the urban fabric comprising the space between Künstlerhaus Bethanien and PROGRAM.
ACT III (at PROGRAM)
Since 2004 Bizumic has been working on a multi-channel video project called event.horizon.black.hole. An angled wall in the gallery acts as a screen for a pair of mirrored video projections. A video of the crumbling architecture of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris is projected back-to-back with images of an avalanche on Mt. Cook, itself a UNESCO world heritage site in New Zealand. Mirrored along the bend in the wall, each pair of projections resembles an enormous, constantly morphing Rorschach blot. On this occasion, a multi-channel soundtrack has been added, bringing together ambient sounds taken from the Berlin Museum Island (also a world heritage site), with the flapping noises of flags outside the UN Headquarters in New York. The projections dematerialize the wall while the soundtrack organizes notions of nationality, geography, and the concept of a world heritage.
ACT I (at Künstlerhaus Bethanien)
Freud Museum (for her) 2006-2007 is a vitrine of fragments from buildings in Vienna. Two commissioned works accompany this: a piano piece composed by his Viennese girlfriend (a musician), and a ‘psychoanalytic poem’ written by his mother (a psychologist) which both articulate the personal dimensions embedded in the work. The material index of Vienna’s built environment becomes a self-consciously museological display – it’s materiality abstracted and questioned in turn by the music and poetry.
ACT II (at Künstlerhaus Bethanien)
Sister Cities of Berlin (Paris) 2007 is a video installation depicting streetlights seen through the glazed door of a building near the National Highway 7 in Paris. The distorted image through the glass is contextualized as a voice-over begins to tell a story of the Parisian suburb Le Kremlin-Bicetre, loosely based on an interview conducted by Bizumic with French artists Saadane Afif and Valerie Chartrain – themselves residents of the aforementioned building. The characters in the narrative are reduced in their description, but a counter point of complexity is provided by the collision of images, poetic verses and ambient sounds composed by MINIT.
Mladen Bizumic (born 1976, lives and works in Berlin) will present his work in the New Zealand Book at the Venice Biennale (2007). Notable exhibitions in the past include: Through the Picture at the 2nd Moscow Biennale (2007), Busan Biennale (2006), Hide-Tide, CAC, Vilnius and Zacheta National Art Museum, Warsaw (2006), Re: Modern, Künstlerhaus Vienna (2005), Fiji Biennale Pavilions, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2003), Mladen Bizumic, ARTSPACE, Auckland (2002).
PROGRAM is a nonprofit project aimed at testing the disciplinary boundaries of architecture through collaborations with other fields. Initiated in 2006 by Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, PROGRAM provides a discursive platform for artists, architects, critics and curators to explore ideas through exhibitions, performances, workshops, lectures, and residencies. PROGRAM intends to diversify the ways we understand and make architecture by engaging the discourse with emerging creative processes that activate the space between pure theoretical research, professional praxis and architecture's social role.
The exhibition is generously supported by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Embassy in Berlin.
opening hours:
Tuesday–Friday 14.00–19.00 hrs
Saturday 11.00–19:00 hrs
For further information please email info@programonline.de, or visit http://www.programonline.de
Posted by jo at April 10, 2007 11:31 AM
