Mladen Bizumic -- The Ecology of Attention

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.