28/3/2007
Mladen Bizumic
Program, Berlin
How If - A Translation in III Acts
How If - A Translation in III Acts
PROGRAM – initiative for art and 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 (open 29.03–15.04 / visit http://www.bethanien.de for
more details).
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.
Program
Invalidenstrasse 115 - Berlin
opening hours: Tuesday–Friday 14.00–19.00 hrs; Saturday 11.00–19:00 hrs