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David Maljkovic (HR)
Without Title


Without Title, 2009
Installation
Construction board, steel, concrete, aluminium,
printed

Karmeliterplatz

The focus of David Maljkovic’s analysis is on the former utopian thrust of political and artistic concepts from the middle of the 20th century. Between 1970 and 1981, Croatian artist Vojin Bakic, as influential at that time as he was controversial, set up a monument in Petrova Gora that was commissioned by the then socialist regime as a memorial to Yugoslav partisans who fell in World War II. The area in which the monument stands was taken by the Serbs between 1991 and 1995 and fell into rapid decline. The monument, reminiscent of architectural utopias from the 1960s, its current deserted state and the suppression of its historical link in view of the political reorientation of the former Yugoslav states allows Maljkovic to use the monument as a platform for imagining a possible future or even a reinvention of the past. A construction board at Karmeliterplatz displaying a photo-montage of a planned building declares an undefined area to be the construction site for a new cultural institution, an Academy of Fine Arts for Graz. Transplanting the socialist monument from Croatia, or former Yugoslavia, to Graz raises numerous questions regarding differences in terms of time, ideology and culture. The planned building is obviously displaced and totally unrealistic – but does this equally apply to those utopias underlying the original monument design? Do we even still see the public space as a venue for debating social utopias or is it rather about entertainment and consumption?







Commissioned by steirischer herbst
Project sponsor Think!


25/09 - 18/10
Utopia and Monument I

Fri 25/09, 6 pm
Vernissage at the exhibition pavilion, Platz der Freiwilligen Schützen / Bad zur Sonne

public space



David Maljkovic
Born in Rijeka (CRO) in 1973, lives in Zagreb (CRO).