politics of gaze / relations of understanding

I will base this textual appendix to David Maljković’s first exhibition in Split on two guiding principles that I find particularly intriguing: the politics of gaze and relations of understanding. My intention, first and foremost, is to emphasize the artist’s completely new approach to the experience and analysis of the exhibition, primarily its formation, that is, its language and potential meaning.

The exhibition syntax i.e., a completely new relational reality, is built through a peculiar recognition of the formal reflex from one object to the other, or by insisting on their entirely disparate phenomena, in a relatively small gallery space with specifically intrusive walls constructed from robust Late Antique ashlars. I dare say, not an easy task in the space with a deeply encoded historicity. All the more so, given the artist’s effort at the general suppression of content and his focus on the very act of exhibiting and the exhibition set-up. An observer who is not familiar with David’s previous artistic practice will perhaps focus his attention solely on the subtle network of relationships that are created between the exhibited objects, while for others it will act as a reminder to activate the process of intertextuality and an understanding of somewhat broader contexts of changes that occurred in the manner and the artist’s approach to the staging of his previous exhibitions, including this one, but also some other components. I consider it pertinent here to quote one of David’s sentences that he articulated during our first conversation, and which makes a significant contribution to the understanding of his artistic thinking: “When I talk about the set-up, it, for me, is not an establishment of control, but a relinquishment…” I would add that this is equally true of the artist’s work process on the exhibition, from the initial idea to the factual execution, but also of all subsequent observer reactions, which is confirmed by the artist himself: “The politics of gaze is not unambiguous and it moves in several directions and this gaze is not here only to mark something, but to let all these relationships through, and with them, to establish new values. What is being displayed here is not the motif, but that which exists between you and the motif.”      

The working concepts in considering David’s exhibition in Split are actually technical in nature and are usually understood as important but their meaning is still secondary in the formation of exhibition “content”: PLATES and PLYNTHS. Here, however, David activates them as the basis for establishing different types of exhibition relations. It is interesting to observe them both in the spatial articulation of the exhibition and in the layout of its accompanying publication. The pedestals act as literal and metaphorical platforms on which (or around which) motifs, or images, understood in the broader sense, are objectified. Specifically, these motifs (images) adopt their secondary being and become objects whose content, as well as their interrelationships, is positioned and moderated precisely by pedestals. We find a similar relational quality in the publication illustrations (plates), the immediate encounter of which is resolved in the dynamics of a somewhat more complex semantic loop, thus extending the basis of the exhibition set-up in the gallery space itself.        

In short, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the components of the gallery and bibliophilic vein that is created around David Maljković’s exhibition, regardless of whether we are talking about this or some of the previous exhibition dates. 

digression 1:

From the very beginning, I was “intrigued” by the list of works that will be shown and the manner in which they will be exhibited. Indeed, the usual cataloguing of works is a practical and bureaucratic job, but in the case of David Maljković it is actually a “list” that has a completely different conceptual basis – devoid of the final autonomous fixing and immersed in some other future perspective. Specifically, the collective existence of works is extremely important and it should be approached as a sort of linguistic repository that builds relationships, those expected and unexpected. The nature of the exhibition will actually depend on the immediate surroundings, but also the temporal distance and the artist’s experience contained therein. The repository is permanently supplemented with neologisms – therefore, new works – depending on the contexts and events. Nevertheless, despite undoubtedly being singular phenomena, the works are generally perceived as exhibition positions that initiate various communicative combinatorics and fluid readings. David Maljković’s exhibitions are diagrams that are intentionally dynamic and associative.   

digression 2:

Each object is determined by its own particular appearance which can become the exclusive focal point of the observer’s gaze and his greater scrutiny. Delving deeper into the formal reading initiates a series of potentially semantic stratifications that still find wider resonance in the syntactic composition of the entire exhibition. It is, however, interesting to consider them on a discursive line about the crisis of the object that is present throughout the twentieth century, particularly its latter half. I would, for instance, be inclined to single out the work Glimpses, 2019 that actually represents the reuse of the Red Boby trolley, a famous example of product design from the late 1960s, by the Italian designer Joe Colombo. This object is, therefore, historically anchored and highly relevant for observing the formal nature of a particular time, so it falls into the realm of the “familiar” (schematized) experience. However, having one of its parts immersed into epoxy resin, it is pushed into otherness, that is, an arena of a completely different reality. Normally movable and transformable in shape this utility object becomes a seemingly immobilized exhibit. The feeling of the object being anaesthetized is caused by the sharp edges of the resin, the introduction of which creates “conceptual cracks” in the visual field, so the entire object, despite its geometric complexity, actually becomes restless and seeks new relations and(or) potential meaning within the framework of the current exhibition set-up.
Dalibor Prančević

David Maljković was born in 1973 in Rijeka. He lives and works in Zagreb. His recent solo exhibitions include: the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Palais de Tokyo in Paris Kunstmuseum in Sankt Gallen, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Kunsthalle in Basel, Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven, Secession in Vienna. He also exhibited his works at the 11th Gwangju Biennale, 56th Venice Biennale, 29th Sao Paolo Biennale, 11th and 9th Istanbul Biennale etc. His works are part of collections of numerous world museums, such as G. Pompidou Centre in Paris, MUMOK in Vienna, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, MoMA in New York, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Tate Collection in London.