Mladen Bizumic is an artist based between Vienna and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland whose practice spans photography, painting, video installation, and research-based projects. His work has been shown internationally in over 40 solo exhibitions and more than 150 group shows.

He holds both, a BFA (Fine Arts) and an MFA (Fine Arts) from the University of Auckland, and a PhD (Art Theory and Cultural Studies) from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, supervised by Diedrich Diederichsen and Stephen Zepke.

Bizumic’s artwork has been collected by public museums and notable collections including MUMOK – Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Te Papa Tongarewa – Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; FRAC Pays de la Loire, Nantes; Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Chartwell Collection – Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki; University of Auckland Art Collection; Victoria University Art Collection, Wellington; October Salon Collection, Belgrade and Fotosammlung des Bundes – Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg.

In Enter Image, Exit Image, Lizi Mud McBane characterises Bizumic’s practice as an examination of the ontology of the image. The essay proceeds as follows:

Before anything else, a disclaimer: Bizumic once told me, it can take years after finishing a project before one can speak of it with coherence. Perhaps because his approach is neither medium-specific nor strictly post-conceptual. Bizumic’s art moves between photography, sculpture, installation, and proposals that unite material experimentation with cultural critique. What unifies it, if anything at all, is a highly subjective approach to systems—institutional, ideological, aesthetic, and technological—that condition what we see and how we see. His practice carries a paradoxical charge: it is both an affirmation of image-making and a critical reflection on its very foundations.

In recent projects, images are no longer made solely by hand or lens; they emerge from failures, accidents and collaborations with decay. For example, in ALBUM and MoMA’s BABY, mycelium has colonised outdated scanners. The resulting pigment prints, full of scanning errors and unpredictable colour shifts, are both lush and unsettling. Technology, in these works, doesn’t function cleanly. Nor should it. What it reveals instead is an unstable space where image-making slips out of control, and where machines falter, and organic forms take over.

His interest in instability is longstanding. Bizumic’s first solo exhibition at Sue Crockford Gallery in Auckland (2001) featured large-scale transparencies of golf courses that were simultaneously seductive, pristine, and unsettling. These landscapes, meticulously manicured, are ideologically charged, exposing the colonial logic embedded within them.

Since the early 2000s, his work has tracked the changing conditions of image culture. From analogue to digital. From photography to scanning. From the white cube to the edge of the quarry. Along the way, Bizumic has interrogated the structures that underpin them. Some of these structures are physical. Others, economic, institutional or imagined. Projects like Tauranga Guggenheim (Aotearoa Artspace, 2002), Fiji Biennale Pavilions (Istanbul Biennial, 2006), and The Night Shift: The Little Barrier Island in the Lagoon of Venice (Auckland Art Gallery, 2008) function as speculative architectures or environmental interventions. They are more than mere exhibitions or critiques thereof; they serve as frameworks for exploring colonialism, cultural translation, and the function of contemporary art.

Bizumic's questions remain consistent. For example: What endures when a system collapses? His ongoing projects KODAK and ALBUM offer one possible answer. Through interviews with early digital imaging pioneers (Russell and Joan Kirsch, Steve Sasson), Bizumic reconstructs a prehistory of the digital image. Rochester, New York (once the American capital of photography and home to both Kodak and Xerox) now stands as a diminished reflection of its former self. Not only a story of industrial decline, but also one of technological amnesia. What innovation brings, it can just as easily erase. In the wake of this erasure, what often resurfaces is a mix of political vacuum and resurgent nationalism. Bizumic’s projects Hotel Jugoslavija and From Cube to Ball explore modernist architecture, using 20th-century buildings to reflect on both the pursuit of socially progressive ideals and the breakdown of collective identity. As Daniel Horn noted in his Frieze review of Bizumic’s Moca Belgrade exhibition:

“A suite of identical hotel mirrors hung in several facing pairs, creating the familiar effect of endless reflection of the self, here enacts the kind of destabilizing of ideology, -isms and history colonizing visual perception the artist seems to engage in, asking which one trails the other.”

COPIA: Collection of Post-Industrial Arts (Lombardi–Kargl, Vienna, 2023) extends this line of inquiry. The starting point: a broken HP Scanjet G4050 scanner overtaken by fungus. What grows inside becomes the source of the ALBUM series which result in large-scale images full of glitches, refractions, and chromatic overloads. Here, error is embraced. Failure becomes form. One word comes to mind: microscopic. Another: space exploration. This is a human/non-human process collaboration with mycelium. These images seem to suggest another way of seeing (and another way of being) existing just beyond what our lens were built to record. Apertures appear again and again in Bizumic’s practice. Lenses. Windows. Circular voids. They act as thresholds between inside and outside, seen and unseen, human and machine.

This logic extends to his most recent project, developed on the island of Favignana, off the coast of Sicily. There, in the Giardino dell’Impossibile, a former limestone quarry turned botanical archive which Bizumic finds a new kind of site. Once a place of extraction, now one of cultivation. For over four decades, Maria Gabriella Campo has transformed the quarry into a flourishing garden with more than 500 plants. A living archive. Lush and uneven. Yet, extravagantly subjective. Bizumic’s response is visual, tactile, and conceptual. He photographs, prints, collages, paints, and overpaints fragments of the garden. These are housed in hand-built frames, each coated in 23.75-karat Italian gold. Gold, in this context, is not mere ornamentation. It is a material with its own logic and its own history. Gold radiates light. Photography records it. In Bizumic’s work, the two sit together (image and frame) like a double exposure. Together, they complicate the relationship between presence and absence. Between what has been and what is. What remains is a question: How do we rebuild from ruins?”

Bizumic’s recent group and solo exhibitions include KCB – the Cultural Centre of Belgrade (2025); the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Lombardi–Kargl, Vienna (2023); the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota (2022); MUMOK – the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2021); Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland (2020); Vienna Biennial, MAK – the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2019); Camera Austria, Graz (2019); Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2018); Art Basel (2017); MOSTYN, Wales (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2017); Zacheta – the National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2017); George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York (2016); FRAC Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2016); Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2016); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2015); Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2014); Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland (2014); galerie frank elbaz, Paris (2014); Kunstmuseum, Thun (2013); KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2013); Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington (2013); Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna (2012); Kopfbau, Basel (2011); Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2010); Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2009); Le Ferme du Buisson, Paris (2008); steirischer herbst festival, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz (2008); Lyon Biennial, MoCA, Lyon (2007); Te Papa – The Museum of New Zealand, Wellington (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2007); PROGRAM, Berlin (2007); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2007); Moscow Biennale (2007); CAC – Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2006); Busan Biennial, Metropolitan Art Museum, Busan (2006); Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth (2006); the City Gallery, Wellington (2005); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2004); Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland (2002), Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland (2002).

Bizumic has been awarded numerous prizes, grants and fellowships including, the State Scholarship for Art Photography of the Chancellery of Austria (2022); the London Residency of the Chancellery of Austria and Austrian Cultural Forum (2020); Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography (nomination), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2018); New Work Grant, Creative New Zealand (2005, 2009, 2017); Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (nomination), The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2015); Artist-in-Residence, Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland (2007); Artist-in-Residence, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2006-2007); Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, University of Otago, Dunedin (2004); Artist-in-Residence, Govett Brewster Art Gallery (2003); Fowlds Memorial Prize as the most distinguished student in the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Architecture, Property, Planning & Fine Arts (2000).

Bizumic has given lectures at art institutions including the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; Art University Linz; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Camera Austria, Graz; Art History Department, University of Auckland; Auckland University of Technology; School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin; Victoria University of Wellington; Massey University, Wellington; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art – the State University of Florida.

The artwork of Bizumic has been written about in Artforum, Frieze, Camera Austria, Parnass, Springerin, Eikon, the New Zealand Herald, the NZ Listener, Slanted, Die Presse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Le Monde. Bizumic's own writing has been published by TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Berlin.

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