EQUALITY

The Leopold Museum, Vienna

Photography for Mladen Bizumic is not a neutral medium that guarantees the objective rendering of reality but rather a specific form of mediality that he analyzes in its respective historic context and its materiality. His installation EQUALITY (2017) at the Leopold Museum is based on the awareness that through the media and materiality of the images it produces, photography influences society’s orders of perception and determines the structure of experienced reality, but at the same time also holds up a mirror to the power and interest-driven politics of the social system. On the immanent level, this awareness leads to the phenomenon, typical of his works, that he treats photography as “both material and concept.” Analog photography is thus not only the artistic medium with which Bizumic primarily works: its history as well as the dispositifs of perception associated with it determine both his handling of the material and the content level of his works. Their necessarily relational reading reveals his multilayered, conceptual approach to the medium. Through this, the artist firmly fixes his works in the very area of tension that photography defines in its growing obsolescence as an analog document on the one hand and the increasingly dominant, perception-occupying position of the digital image on the other, and acts as its interpreter.

Stephanie Damianitsch