New Reproduction

David Maljkovic
Born in Rijeka, Croatia, in 1972.
He lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

Croatian conceptual artist David Maljkovic investigates the politics of memory and the way people construct historical narratives to suit their present-day social and economic agendas. Based in Zagreb, Maljkovic has focused on the turbulent history of Croatia. Working in collage, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation, he strives to understand the country’s collective amnesia: of atrocities against the Serbs during World War II ; of the dissolution of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by the Nazis in 1941; and of the Croatian War of Independence (1991–1995), when freedom-seeking Croats battled with Serbian minorities after seceding from Communist Yugoslavia in 1991. The government of Croatia has since attempted to stabilize a political culture of democracy and to develop a coherent national identity, although Maljkovic has noted that the people of contemporary Croatia remain melancholic and disillusioned.
David Maljkovic has carried out extensive research into the forgotten monuments and landmarks of bygone utopian eras, not only to fill the lacunae of Croatia’s recent national history but also to incite a new avant-garde people’s history. As an artist, however, he refrains from engaging directly in empirical research. Instead, he reflects on the materials and mechanisms with which historians piece together collective memory—archives, museums, exhibitions, and other framing devices that are used to record, reproduce, and transmit images to the public (by cameras and film projectors, for example). Maljkovic’s installations are discursive and dreamlike spaces for thinking about dominant and counterhistorical narratives. They are appealing precisely because they lack a coherent thesis that argues for one historical truth over another. He develops a state of consciousness wherein the past is continuously debated and made present at the threshold of the future.
Maljkovic’s conceptual approach to art and history stems from the tradition of institutional critique, which began in the late 1960s with such pioneers as the Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers and the German– American conceptual artist Hans Haacke. Institutional critique foregrounds the social function of art as a negotiation between the artist and the institution. When Maljkovic’s installations travel from one museum to another, he meticulously reorganizes the selection of materials and the layout according to the architecture and atmosphere of the building. In so doing, he responds to its institutional memory and calls attention to its structural constraints and its affective potential. His installation New Reproductions (2015) at the Biennale di Venezia, for example, was shown at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2013. Here he presents six new reproductions of previous projects each stacked against the other.