Events/Openings

Bojan Sarcevic
"In The Rear View Mirror"
Opening: Friday, 1 May 2015, 6–9 pm
Exhibition: 2 May – 18 July 2015

During Berlin Gallery Weekend 2015, BQ presents "In The Rear View Mirror", the gallery’s fifth solo show with Bojan Sarcevic. Problematizing the understanding of an artwork’s (and an exhibition’s) past, present, future, and the process of conceptualization in between, the exhibition takes as its deliberate point of departure another exhibition by the artist.

"In The Rear View Mirror" takes the same title as the show that it self-consciously rearticulates, and acts as a refractive image of the exhibition held at Pinksummer, Genoa in Autumn 2014. The original exhibition had as its center two sculptures that relate to a larger architectonic work the artist plans to build: the model for a mountain refuge the artist designed and a 1:1 Styrofoam scale model of the wall of the imagined refuge. Around these, a series of other free-standing structures were organized – part walls, part display supports for other works. They hosted a whole series of poster images and hanging sculptures comprised of sweaters encrusted with wax, silicon breast implants and prosthetics, or bed sheets. Positioned around the model elements for a yet unbuilt architecture, that previous show was constructed in relation to the artist’s projection about something that was yet unknown and unrealized.

If that show was somehow set in an indeterminate future, here, the artist reflects on the immediate past. All the works from the previous exhibition are presented again here, but more than a displacement of works from one exhibition to another, there is a crucial conceptual thread tendered between the two exhibitions: alongside showing the works first shown in Genoa, the artist includes a number of new pieces that act as eerie referents to those works. In some cases, the artist created replicas of the original works in different materials.

As in the original exhibition, here few walls act as structural surfaces for objects and posters that are installed on them. The objects are made of cloth and silicon, whose corporeal colours and organic forms evoke flesh. While some of the works suggest soft organic forms, fluids, or cells, others appear clearly defined, stable and geometric. The interrelation of those seeming opposites coalesces in the scale model of the wall of the artist’s designed refuge. Made of soft and light Styrofoam, it contradicts its own bulky and massive, dark grey appearance. The cuboid form is built of several irregular pentagon solids, a consistent yet complicated construction of the simple outline of the whole. Like little descendants of the pentagons, smaller white plaster and silicon offsets of them can be found elsewhere in the exhibition. They suggest an ongoing process of construction and deconstruction, fragmentariness, and capture of already defined forms and the – sometimes false – reproduction of their shapes. Between the two exhibitions, questions about the volatility of meaning in relation to perception and the subject’s positioning in time are at stake – it is a gaze in the rear view mirror of sorts.

Bojan Sarcevic was born in 1974 in Belgrade and studied art in Paris and Amsterdam. Since his participation in Manifesta 2 in 1998, he has been featured in numerous international group shows, including the 50th Venice Biennial in 2003 and 3rd Berlin Biennal in 2004. His work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Munich and Kunstverein Heilbronn; Bawag Foundation, Vienna; Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine; Mambo, Bologna; Kunstverein Hamburg; De Vleeshal, Middleburg; Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire; Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren; Institut d’art contemporain in Villeurbanne; and Kunstmuseum, Liechtenstein.