Barrel Gallery

Trg žrtava fašizma bb

Bojan Gagić: REMIX MANGELOS

16 - 26 April, 2009.

Exhibition opening April 16, 2009. at 7 pm.

Remix Mangelos is a sound-visual installation performed in the form of a concert in front of an audience. The work has been created as homage to the work of the art historian, curator and artist Dimitrij Bašičević Mangelos (Šid 1921 – Zagreb 1987). His works can be found in the collections of world museums such as Centre Georges Pompidou, MoMa and the Tate Modern. In Croatia his work is still largely unknown.

In one of his artistic stages DB Mangelos used school globes which he covered with color and then wrote certain sentences, messages, formulas and manifests on them. He called them landscapes.

Bojan Gagić performed Remix Mangelos for the first time in 2002 in the Church of St. Dominik in Zadar as part of the project Digging the Channel and in collaboration with the Boston-based art group Moebius; soon thereafter he performed it as part of the off program at the Mittelfest in Cividale and at the Art Residency in Lazareti. In 2004 the work was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the experimental program Pilot 04.

In this project the artist also uses school globes with a 40 cm diameter in matte black color. They do not contain any text, they are Tabulae Rasae in themselves. Above the globes, on the gallery construction in the central part of the room, there are spotlights which receive a dimmer signal through a multichannel light processor. The channels are divided into several different groups according to their frequencies.

The switching on and off and the intensity of each spotlight vary depending on the input sound signal which comes from the audio mixer and which is created in a live performance by the musicians. After a period of time, the heat from the spotlights above the globes begins to alter their structure so that they begin to melt. At the very end of the performance the globes remain as gallery objects of altered form. The alteration of form is the alteration of content.

In the first three performances only one globe was used, while three were used in the fourth performance. Document Remix Mangelos consists of eight objects (globes) and eight documented photographs from the earlier performances.

Basically, the story is very simple:

our internal world

through sound

transformed into light

alters matter around us

The alteration of the globe structure is my sentence, message, formula, manifest.

Bojan Gagić,

multimedia artist,

a member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HDLU),

member of Community of Croatian Artists (ZUH), exhibits actively since 1990.