Mladen Bizumic

Bankruptcy and Reorganisation

The exhibition is a part of the series “time-specific” curated by Dorota Walentynowicz. 

“If you ask me, as people did many years later, about digital photography as it started to mature in the late 1990s, I would say : Yes, I did take the first digital snapshot. So what?" - Steven Sasson

During his first solo show in Poland, Mladen Bizumic exhibits works which constitute yet another stage of a long-running photographic project dedicated to products of the legendary manufacturer Kodak. The title of the exhibition, Bankruptcy and Reorganization, refers to the most recent history of Kodak which, in 2012 (after over 130 years in business), filed for bankruptcy and began restructuring so as to remain afloat on the market.
In a series of photographs, publications, objects and collages which make up that long-running and multi-themed project, Bizumic shows pieces of material history bearing Kodak’s logo and, with characteristic elegance, “reorganizes” its individual fragments. The mass-produced items are treated as precious finds, as the artist closely analyses their historical as well as visual value. Simultaneously, Bizumic looks for the links between the structure of the Eastman-Kodak corporation and its production lines, between the decisions of the management and the finished product in the form of photographic material, with which we, the users, used to record our images and thanks to which contemporary visual culture emerged. 

A key element of the project is the interview (excerpts quoted here) that  Mladen Bizumic conducted with the legendary inventor Steven Sasson who, working nowhere else but in Kodak’s labs in Rochester, NY, built the first ever digital camera in 1976.  The motif of invention appears in the exhibition on several occasions – in the quotes from the Patent Office where the camera was registered (KODAK (Patent Network)), as well as in the images of the device itself - reproduced using various photographic media and integrated into a collage (KODAK (Thin Layers of Dignity)), or multiplies and cut into a visual confetti, packed tightly into a photographic frame (KODAK (Tail or Tale?)).

"…These (corporate) Kodak guys weren’t dumb… I mean it was a crude photography and I wasn't endangering film photography in any way at that time [1976]. But they were also smart enough to know that I was a 25-year old kid in a laboratory doing no film, no paper photography and looking at the picture right away. What could happen?…" *
Paradoxically, the collapse of the photographic potentate was due precisely to the advances in digital photography, a technology which originated from Kodak’s own laboratories. The history of departure from photo-chemical processes and the “switch-over” of contemporary photography to digital solutions is a vital element for the interpretation of the displayed works. Not only does the artist analyse the very nature of image and the device which produces that image, but also attempts to detect the traces of materiality in the by default non-material digital image. Thus he poses art’s crucial question about the nature of “value” in the post-material era.  
"We filed a pattern. I didn't even know what a pattern was. I worked with (an attorney) Dennis Monteith who wrote     the fundamental of it. When I read it know - it was actually well-written. Dennis did a great job because he captured the essence of the invention. The essence of the invention was to electronically capture a photo-site (a charge pattern), digitise it and then,  store it rather quickly all in real time, and then, read out from the memory slowly to a more permanent form of storage. That was the fundamental nature of the pattern and that represents the fundamental architecture of the digital cameras, even today. That's how it works."  
Mladen Bizumic also annexes the context and the site of exhibition as part of the artistic material. When designing the exhibition, the artist drew upon the architecture of the pf Gallery and the linearity of display that the interior imposes. The artist “challenges” the Classicist-Brutalist colonnade, a characteristic trait of the gallery: he introduces a new exhibitive order and creates his own frame of display.
On the other hand, we encounter references to the history of local manufacturing – the works from the series U.S. Bankruptcy Chapter 11: Reorganization have been printed on paper collected in the bankrupt ZNTK (Railway Rolling Stock Repair Company) in Poznañ. Thus he draws attention to the fact that the neo-liberal strategy of “reorganisation” following the Western model, played a key role in the process of de-industrialisation which has been taking place in Poland in the two past decades. 

The paper from the ZNTK plant, whose yellowed, subtle texture endows the photographs with a unique properties highlighting their materiality, was used in a different fashion as well: spread in dense sheets along the gallery’s axis it traces a horizontal line which surrounds all the elements inside. Consequently, the artist creates new perspective viewpoints and new opportunities of building relationships between the space and the viewer.