21 Jul 2011

Isak Berbic: From the Life of Engineer D.M. at Novi Hram, Sarajevo

Novi Hram is pleased to present Isak Berbic, a solo exhibition of new work 'From the Life of Engineer D.M.'

Berbic assembles photographic material, drawing from private, found and media images, staging a story of expatriate guest-work, political conflict, a rare vacation, and life back home. The narrative, presented as a sequence of photographs and footnotes, records fragments from the life of engineer D.M., an expert on thermostable materials for the production of industrial chimney-stacks. D.M.'s work took him, and his camera, through Lybia, Lebanon, East Germany, Italy, the Non-Aligned, and Africa dating from the 1970's until the 1990's.

Complicating the binary of fiction and nonfiction, Berbic proposes a history of an individual, whose account unfolds into current global politics. From the Life of Engineer D.M. combines archive material, technical photographs, documentary images, tourist snapshots and text, speculating on the visualization of histories, cultural, ideological, socio-political and aesthetic production of memory.

Isak Berbic is an artist, writer and lecturer born (1983) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He studied Photography, Film and Electronic Media at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, he practiced art, worked in theater, and was art director of a political monthly journal. In 2007 he moved to work in the Middle East, where he currently teaches photography and media at University of Sharjah. He is a contributor to numerous projects and publications on contemporary art. His research deals with histories, politics, tragedy, memory, humor, exile, and the limits of representation.

Isak Berbic has exhibited in Brief Histories 2011, Sharjah, UAE; Dojima River Biennale 2009, Osaka, Japan; Singapore Biennale 2008; Jatiwangi Art Festival 2008, Indonesia; The First International Photography Biennial, Teheran, Iran 2007; Normalization in honor of Nikola Tesla, Galerija Nova, WHW Zagreb, Croatia 2004. He participated in Images Moving Across the Arts and Disciplines 2010, 12th. Laterna Film Academy, Pecs, Hungary; the International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA 2008 Singapore; Take a Deep Breath: an interdisciplinary symposium, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2007. In 2010, Isak Berbic was a resident at the Transart Institute, Berlin, Germany.