Mladen Bizumic

1 January 1970

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29 November – 22 December 2007

Artist in Resident 15 October – 22 December

In asscosiation with Sue Crockford Gallery

Two Rooms Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Mladen Bizumic, our artist in residence for November/December 2007. This has been organized in association with Sue Crockford Gallery.

Bizumic was awarded the 2006-2007 Creative New Zealand Artist-In-Residence to Berlin and is now back in Auckland after an incredible 12 months in which he has been invited to represent New Zealand in 4 major international biennales: Busan Biennale 2006, Korea; Moscow Biennale 2007, Russia; Istanbul Biennale 2007, Turkey and Lyon Biennale 2007, France.

An Expedition-Yet To Happen is an exhibition structured as a musical in III acts – Aotearoa/Old Europe/Mars. Each work starts with a particular location but these are not literal depictions of these locations; these are tales of travel and tales that have travelled. They are the passage of journey to experience, and the representation of that experience. However, this exhibition is not a record of an expedition that has already taken place, but rather a scenario for a collective expedition yet to come, a poetic expedition rather than a scientific one.

The exhibition will feature a range of recent and past works that highlight Bizumic’s use of multimedia. On view will be a selection of recent paintings, video installations, sculptures, as well as three text works. Over the past two years, Bizumic has extended his investigation of spatial interventions to include what he describes as video environments. This exhibition will be the first presentation in New Zealand of two new video environments, which have been seen only in Europe, most recently in 00’s A History of Decade That Has Not yet Been Named at the Lyon Biennale, France (on view until January 2008), and in April-May as part of How If: A Translation In III Acts, a solo show at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.

In the new series of paintings States in Transition Bizumic continues his research into the phenomenology of structures. Each canvas begins with topographical lines of geography; these lines while depicting no particular place explore our relationship between subjectivity and representation, physical locations and psychological states, memory and present.

The exhibition offers the experience of a traveller into the unknown, prepared and yet desiring the unexpected; with the proposition that our engagement with art is a form of movement, of travel, a journey across time and space towards something we consider the work of art, although that work only exists in our working towards it.