Here and Now
Mladen Bizumic: How Do We Rebuild From Ruins? by Lizi Mud McBane
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 For example, in ALBUM and MoMA’s BABY, mycelium has colonised outdated scanners.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. →
Springerin
Mladen Bizumic: When Machines Began to See by Franz Thalmair
Self-reflection generally makes things difficult for flatbed scanners. Visual confusion arises if there is something transparent or even a mirror on the glass surface under which the device’s illumination and scanning unit moves. That is because the light that the scanner emits, which is reflected by the object and which the scanner's moving sensor tries to capture line by line, dazzles the machine while it is systematically measuring the object. Navel-gazing simply does not succeed with that kind of play of light. Mladen Bizumic's research and eponymous installation, MoMA's Baby, take as the point of departure this disruption of self-perception - the moment when the process of digitalization fails due to the characteristics of the analogue original. →
Frieze
Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art: Mladen Bizumic by Daniel Horn
Luxury hotels have long fuelled the cultural imagination. Places like The Plaza or The Ritz continue to concretize otherwise vague desires and promises of glamour and social status thanks to their recurring pop-cultural circulation, dropped as names or serving as movie sets; never mind that these venues have long been outgunned globally by some seven-star spectacles in Dubai. And according to Jay-Z and Kanye’s 2011 track ‘Niggas in Paris’, where it’s at now is Le Meurice. Times change. And they certainly did for Belgrade’s Hotel Jugoslavija, a formerly grand but now defunct concrete colossus of the species, at the centre of artist Mladen Bizumic´’s eponymous exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. →
DoBeDo
Mladen Bizumic On The Intersection of Photography by Song-I Saba
Mladen Bizumic began documenting his life as a teenager in New Zealand using now-extinct Kodak film. Decades later, in his 2018 book Photo Boom Photo Bust, Bizumic reflects on the rise and fall of Kodak, the giant of the industry that put cameras in the hands of millions and made "Kodak moments'' a part of everyday life. These days, you can find Mladen working on his multidisciplinary practice from his airy, immaculate Vienna studio, exploring cultural shifts through the lens of photography with poetic precision. His work delves deeply into the intersections between the material and digital, often using the history of photography as a means to explore broader societal issues. →
Camera Austria
Post-conceptual analogoue by Stephen Zepke
Mladen Bizumic’s work begins from a deceptively simple question: “What is photography?” And while not the first to ask it, Bizumic will offer an original and complex answer that unfolds itself be- tween two oppositions; that of analogue and digital photography, and of modernist and conceptual artistic practice. From this perspective Bizumic’s work explores the vacillations of redundancy and re-invention, of receding into history and return by focussing on the rise and fall of the Eastman Kodak Company. Founded in 1880, responsible for selling Brownie box camera’s to the masses, achieving a 90% US market share in 1976, before fil- ing for bankruptcy 2012 after inventing the digital camera in 1975, but failing to put it into production. The story is a salutary tale of conservative, corporate hubris, and how capitalism and technological development has changed everything. →
Revolver Publishing
Free Kodak: Mladen Bizumic by Adam Carr
Free Kodak, or #FreeKodak as it is announced on social media, is a present day call to the musician Kodak Black. Born in Florida, US, Dieuson Octave, or Kodak Black his stage name has warranted the status of freedom since an early age, as an offender from his early years, no stranger to a youth detention center. Kodak has also wanted to free himself in a number of other ways. Following a long history of rappers who made hip hop a form of freedom of expression, Kodak Black articulates the suppression and aggression of living in a disadvantaged area of the US in a way that has allowed relevance that extends far beyond the confines of their neighbourhoods, reaching to a global audience. His rise to fame has facilitated much prosper, namely personal wealth, that has connected his dreams with reality. Yet, while this more advantaged position suggests a liberty – a liberation from the elements that constitute and define much of the US’ poverty stricken areas – it seems that Black has not been able to attain that position, or even be on the path to achieve that goal. His pattern is circular – progressing to only fall back to his initial trappings: jail. What does a rapper from Florida have to do with the New-Zealand raised, Austrian based artist Mladen Bizumic anyway? →
THE SEEN – Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art
From Print to Negative and Vice Versa by Alfredo Cramerotti
The following conversation between writer Alfredo Cramerotti and artist Mladen Bizumic took place during lunch in the leafy garden of a restaurant in the Museum Quarter of Vienna, in June 2018. It just preceded the preparation for a group show at the Society for Projective Aesthetics, a Kunsthalle-like exhibition space and program which was the brainchild of the late gallerist and curator Georg Kargl, with whom the artist had a close relationship. →
Eikon Magazine
Demontage eines Imperiums / Exposing the Empire: Mladen Bizumic by Ruth Horak
Ein warmer, ins Orange gehender Gelbton hat die Fotografie des 20. Jahrhunderts mitbestimmt – mit einfach zu bedienenden Kameras, einem dazu passenden Rundum-Service, einer Fülle verschiedenster Filme, Filter, Fotopapiere u.v.m. hatten sich George Eastman und seine Nachfolger seit den 1890er Jahren bemüht, die Fotografie mit Produkten der Marke Kodak zu vereinfachen, sie vom Spezialisten in die Hände der Amateure und damit in jeden Haushalt zu bringen. →
Artforum
Phoenix v. Babel by Lilian Davies
In the second room, Bizumic’s playful publication Sister Cities of Babel, is displayed atop a pedestal. Employing a game of translation, Bizumic quotes definitions and coping strategies for culture shock from materials distributed to students, business travelers, and immigrants. Translating each text twice, using a basic online service, the original texts encouraging patience and respect become nonsensical, devoid of any subtlety of tone or style. Bizumic also elaborates the immortal phoenix’s pangs of culture shock in the doomed city of Babel in visual and architectural terms. His collages Le Corbusier vs Mies van der Rohe, depict elegantly decomposing images of buildings by the master architects wherein slices of sky and foliage fall over structural walls and sculpture. Intriguingly, in each elegant image Bizumic suggests the legacy of the phoenix within the crumbling walls of Babel. →
Collectors Agenda
In the Studio: Mladen Bizumic An Interview with Rebecca Akimoto
A “dinosaur between two stories” seems to be a striking way to describe Mladen Bizumic who creates narratives that are linking past and present. The artist works in photography focusing on the shift from analog to digital photography. →
Art News New Zealand
Design Miami
The New Zealand Listener
To the Centre of the City Where All the Roads Meet by Bridie Leonie
New Zealand Herald
Velvet Rickshow