27 Mar 2014

David Maljković at Leal Rios Foundation

The turbulent recent history of Yugoslavia, and its artistic Modernist utopias of the 1950s and 1960s, have contextualized much of David Maljković's work. In recent years, his practice has increasingly focused on erasing content, and revisiting strategies of display and exhibition that reposition and reconstruct his own forms and presentation methods. This dialogue with his own production, and his restaging of previous works in new configurations and layouts, is the operating premise of Maljković's exhibition at the Leal Rios Foundation.

The exhibition combines new works with remakes of previous ones from other exhibitions. In Afterform, 2013 (5:10 min.), the artist appropriates characters from a cartoon in a Croatian architectural magazine from the 1960s, with his own works inserted into the film. Maljković charts a history of his own artistic practice with three photographic collages from the same series, also called Afterform, 2013, which assemble a series of overlapping images from past works and installations. Monochromes, 2013, presents an expanded take on monochrome painting that refers back to the artist's early works in this medium. In Temporary Projections, 2012, the artist treats another device to record time, a 16mm film projector set on a pedestal, as an autonomous sculptural form. Going back to a malleable, circular sense of time, and to forms that have lost their function, in Untitled, 2004, the artist presents a digital clock, with illegible numbers.

Maljković's awareness of the past, and his urge to deconstruct his heritage and empty out form, contend with specific histories as they recover and re-assimilate memory. The generative open space of his objects becomes a site in which to internalize the search for, and the recovery, of collective memories and lost meanings. It also represents a potentiality, a desire, that can suddenly ignite to reveal new possibilities for living in the present and building a different future.

Rina Carvajal