David Maljković

Retired Form, 2008

16 mm film
5 min 33 sec, b/w, silent
Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York

Retired Form was shot on location of the Memorial Park Dotršcina dedicated to the victims of WW2 in Zagreb. The small crystal-shaped monument is by Vojin Bakic´. Bakic´’s work occupies a key position in the art of former Yugoslavia: during the Cold War, abstraction in art was made the arena for quite different and opposing ideologies and their interpretations or appropriations. Bakic’s work rejected such simplifications from the 1950s onwards by employing abstraction—as an artistic grammar of forms inside of the official, socialist art system. With his independent and willful stance within the state art system, he questioned the polarity between which many artists in Eastern Europe had chosen till then: conformity, or a withdrawal into the private sphere. (Metro Pictures)
Unlike many re-enactment works (and the exploration of the various genres of memorials that precede them in art history), David Maljkovic´’s work is not primarily about the past as such, or more precisely, about commemoration. Rather, David Maljkovic´ lets the protagonists in his trip become the media for the relationship between the present and the past. The mediality is not a recording of the past as it was. The motif of the need for translation, of an incomprehensible language plays a significant role in his work. We often tend to forget the difference between hearing (pure system of data) and understanding (imagination, intelligibility, empathy). In order to make sense of the discrete data of history, we need reconstruction, and that means projection. Seen in comparison to practices of archaeology, his work would expand the gap that separates pure data from synthesis, where, in order to make sense of the bits and shreds of a buried past, inevitably imagination and narrativization need come into play, filling the empty space between the different parts or evidence, like narrative bridges, or the glue of the imaginary. (Anselm Franke)

David Maljković, *1973 Rijeka, Croatia