yucolo.com :: Kunstverein in Hamburg

5 July 2008 – 21 September 2008

Bojan Sarcevic - Only After Dark

Bojan Sarcevic first gained international recognition at the second Manifesta 1998 in Luxemburg when he sealed windows, doors, and other openings with paper and pieces of fabric in a former exhibition space of a natural history museum. This interest in space and its social, cultural, and psychological connotations, already apparent here, is still today of fundamental importance for Sarcevic, who was born in Belgrade in 1974. His media range from interventions in found situations, installations, and autonomous sculpture to videos and discursive activities. Thus, at the Berlin Biennial 2004, he presented workers’ favorite clothes. Speculation about their former wearers’ preferences, tastes, and social position, and the peculiar discrepancy between their museal presentation and their signs of wear, emerged in their reception. The situation was similar with his contribution to the exhibition “Formalism—Modern Art, today” at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, for which Sarcevic laid two massive granite working surfaces on black metal frames. Here, too, grooves, scratches, and notches produced by stonemasons in the course of their work contrasted with the presentation of the objects. These “tables” were combined with a work consisting of thin strips of paper draped about the room and measuring out the spatial volume like the lines of a drawing.
Social relevance and autonomy vie with each other in Bojan Sarcevic’s art. The use his works make of the formal vocabularies of the 1910s–1930s can also be viewed against this background. For it was in precisely this period that the decisive 20th-century cleft crystallized out between the idea of a purpose-free art appealing primarily to aesthetic criteria, and a political, agitationist stance that called on art to change society. The work cycle Only After Dark presented at the Kunstverein in Hamburg can be seen in a similar light. In these five 16 mm films presented for the first time together here in Germany, the camera explores the surfaces of abstract objects—small sculptures in wood, metal, and other materials. Music composed specially for the films enhances their mysterious, charged atmosphere that also comes out in the pavilions—reminiscent of constructivist architecture—in which they are presented. Staged and filmed in this way, Sarcevic’s objects shift between landscape, architecture, design, and stage set. The artist deliberately plays off the social determinedness of these realms against the formal elegance of their staging.

Bojan Sarcevic - Only After Dark

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