Film UbuWebDavid Maljkovic (b. 1973)
Scene for New Heritage #1 (2004)
A major artist of the contemporary European scene, David Maljkovic occupies, in his films, photos, collages, drawings, and installations, the frontier between the documentary and science-fiction. Uchronia is present throughout his pioneering work, which shares traits with futuristic novels. At the origin of each of David Maljkovic’s projects there is an architectural space with a powerful story that the artist analyzes, fragments, and deconstructs in order better to reconstruct it: a hospital for communist party member veterans which has become a monument, an exhibition center in Zagreb, the film locations of Orson Welles’s The Trial, which he has rephotographed… so many deserted modernist buildings, evidence of past promises, where memory and imagination end up joined by the artistic gesture.
The spectres of modernism—its politics and aesthetics—loom over and inform this multi-faceted oeuvre consisting of sculpture, collage, painting, drawing, and architectural mises-en-scène. The exhibition focuses attention on the artist’s varied artistic strategies, from earlier work that draws on the history of his native Croatia and the avant-garde of former Yugoslavia, to more recent explorations into the act of exhibition making itself.