Davor Konjikušić: Highway

The motorway as an uninterrupted line, link, communication, symbol or one of the forms of continuity, is presented in this exhibition through a multimedia artistic range of heterogeneous political, historical, but also some completely personal positionings. However, it is not just any motorway, nor was it chosen as a motif primarily for visual reasons. Davor Konjikušić focuses his research in terms of meaning, experience and identity. Systematic research of the A3 motorway, ... Read More

The highway as an uninterrupted line, link, communication, symbol or one of the forms of continuity, is presented in this exhibition through a multimedia artistic range of heterogeneous political, historical, but also some completely personal positionings. However, it is not just any highway, nor was it chosen as a motif primarily for visual reasons. Davor Konjikušić focuses his research in terms of meaning, experience and identity. The author began his systematic research of the A3 motorway, the former "Brotherhood and Unity" highway between Zagreb and Belgrade, and to this day he observes it almost "monumentally", as a medium of questioning and transposing meaning, an open process of valorization and revaluation. The highway thus becomes a kind of paradoxical line in space that connects the two countries, and which, instead of continuity, reflects various forms of discontinuity. Positioning himself as a researcher in the "post-context", a person who observes, searches for or finds concepts, values, events and meanings with a clear time lag, Konjikušić combines an almost scientific research perspective, archival material and documentation, factography, his own photography, artistic experiment, "mistake" or slightly fetishized ready-made gestures of collecting "clues".

The work Autocesta is probably best known to the audience for the author's photographs of the current state of the highway, neglected and devastated buildings, hostels, rest areas and the like. It is this part of the work that most clearly approaches the "aesthetics of ruins", a specific, often controversial, but in recent years increasingly popular genre, especially in photography, which in our country, in addition to the visual stimulus itself, often critically touches on concrete political, economic, post-industrial, transitional or privatization processes. To that extent, the generational shift or the aforementioned position of "-post" seeks to equally synchronously and diachronically capture the time then and now, as well as the relations between socialism and capitalism, interstate relations, ideology, utopia and dystopia.

In addition to new photographs, the exhibition includes, among other things, a series of archival photographs that illustrate the context of the construction of the Highway "Brotherhood and Unity" from 1945 to 1950 and show work, workers' actions, construction phases and the like. There are also photographs of work actions from the 70s in which collage was intervened, as well as those from the 90s that show the war environment and soldiers. Although part of the archival material is concisely and clearly included in the bulletin that has been exhibited several times, the exhibition in the Šira Gallery deliberately omits this segment by inserting some new ones.

For example, the projection of old photographs over slides includes a somewhat bolder departure from the medium of photography, a visual experiment, a small aesthetic gesture, an attempt to collect and visualize the almost non-existent – tiny particles of dust, dirt and soil that the author collected in certain places on the highway. This act is close to discreet personal fetishes of preserving stones, sand, plants and similar pieces of the landscape with the aim of reminding a person of a significant location or event. Dust from the highway here is in the function of a twisted ready-made, a bit of poetic symbolism, playing with the material and the immaterial, and an interesting visual and light stimulus.

The material and the immaterial are also present in "Latent Image", a work about an unrealized monument to work actions from 1950 pulled through a red filter and glitch as a contemporary moment of digital "error" within archival material, and designed as a projection on stone, a material in which the monument was never realized. It is the stone, in addition to recording in the long run, that also contributes to memory, and in a similar way to the entire work of Highways – it imagines, evokes, constructs or reconstructs a utopian scenario in which, among other things, "to work means to build your own dream".

Marija Borovičkić

BIOGRAPHY

Davor Konjikušić was born in Zenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 1979. He graduated in cinematography (BA) and photography (MA) from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. He uses photography as the primary medium to articulate his artistic concept in which he explores the relationship between the private and the public, the intimate and the socio-political. In his artistic practice, Konjikušić combines photography with text, archival materials, found objects and video. He is interested in the role of photography in the establishment of a system of power and surveillance. He lives and works in Zagreb.

Contact: davorko@gmail.com