Colonial Atmospheres

Working in a broad range of media encompassing video, sound, photography, and sculpture Mladen Bizumic explores the relationships that exist between subjectivity and representation, physical locations and psychological states, notions of memory and the experience of displacement.

Regularly using pre-existing cultural material as scenarios set to dismantle, Bizumic constructs new situations to reveal the more unconscious aspects of human production. Often inviting other artists, musicians or other professionals to collaborate on exhibitions, Bizumic presents a translational model that intends to question the meaning of various cultural structures by systematically exploring the bonds that unite individuals, groups and images to produce new relationships and connections. Here Bizumic invited local writer Andrew Paul Wood to translate his moving image into a script/poem which has then been incorporated back into the presentation of Colonial Atmospheres.

This installation provides a glimpse of Bizumic’s cinematic hybrid that blends a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 dystopian film Weekend and a slowed-down orchestral cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1966 hit Under My Thumb. The camera circles endlessly, scenes repeat, change colour and wash out into a space of uncertainty. As the loop takes us through time and space, there is no sense of resolution.

Privileging the process of translation, Colonial Atmospheres revels in the slippages and distortions of conversion. By expanding the site of experience the script/poem becomes both a poetic interpretation of the video and an art work in its own right that continues to investigate the space between action and reflection, personal memorial constructs and collective understandings of history.

Never before screened in New Zealand, Colonial Atmospheres was originally commissioned in 2006 for the exhibition HIGH TIDE - New Currents in Art from Australia and New Zealand, Zacheta - National Museum of Art, Warsaw and has also been shown at Korridor, Berlin; Charim Galerie, Vienna; and in the 2nd Moscow Biennale, Moscow.

Mladen Bizumic graduated with an MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2003 and divides his time between Berlin, Germany and Auckland, New Zealand. He was the Creative New Zealand Artist in Residence in 2006 in Berlin and the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include How If A Translation in III Acts, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and PROGRAM: initiative for art and architectural collaborations, Berlin; 10th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul, Turkey; 9th Lyon Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France; Art of the Nation, Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; Fiji Biennale Pavilions, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; Tauranga Guggneheim, ARTSPACE, Auckland. His works are included in the following public collections: Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; Auckland Art Gallery; University of Auckland; Hocken Library and University of Otago; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Ursula Blickle Lounge at the Kunsthalle Vienna. Bizumic is represented by Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland and Charim Galerie, Vienna. For more information visit www.mladenbizumic.com.