PETAR BUNIĆ

HYPOTHESIS
2008
3600 photograph, Internet. Installation on the top of a building near the exhibition venue

The installation is based on the hypothesis that revolution is impossible within institutional framework, which primarily refers to art institutions and their mechanisms: jury evaluation, credits and awards. That insight has necessarily resulted in the senselessness of exhibiting a “revolutionary” work of art in the context of a jury-evaluated exhibition at one of the top institutions of Zagreb. For this reason, the artist has decided not to be present at the opening ceremony of the Youth Salon, but rather to exhibit his laptop on a nearby roof, featuring an interactive panorama photograph of the utterly empty interior of the building of HDLU. By taking the audience away from the exhibition venue, which the artist shows as devoid of its exhibition function and emptied of all those carefully selected and presented artworks, he has negated the entire manifestation. Paradoxically, he still remains one of the artists exhibiting at the Youth Salon, presenting in his work the exhibition venue without a single exhibit, making the architecture itself become the only exhibit/artwork. It is through its own negation that the institution is reaffirmed. Can we then conclude that the performance has proved the “hypothesis” or else rejected it? By playing with negation and affirmation, cause and effect, in the manner of “Catch 22″, the artist is also playing with the ideas of subversion and sabotage. Do we live in a system that has accepted the consequences of its own sabotage as its own new element?

PETAR BUNIĆ (1980, Zagreb, HR) finished the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb, Department of Metal and graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts, class of Miro Vuco, in 2007. He participated in a number of group exhibitions, art workshops and humanitarian actions, and several of his artworks have been placed in public spaces. He lives and works in Zagreb.