The Nature of Things

Words Andrew Clifford
Portrait Stephen Tilley

On the eve of his departure for the Creative New Zealand Berlin Residency, artist Mladen Bizumic contemplates the way humans attempt to rationalise nature.

“I certainly love nature,” says artist Mladen Bizumic as he watches the sunset from the top of an Auckland hotel. “I adore it because it makes me see how superficial I am because it doesn’t care about me. It certainly doesn’t care about contemporary art or contemporary music… it just exists and has its own system and its own life and we’re kind of passing through.” However, time is running out for Bizumic to contemplate New Zealand sunsets – he heads to Germany for the highly sought after 12-month Creative New Zealand Berlin residency in August.

No stranger to residencies, Bizumic has already worked in Paris, at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth and on the prestigious Frances Hodkins Fellowship in Dunedin. Born in Belgrade in 1977, he has lived in New Zealand for many years, although Vienna has been his base for most of the last two years. He has exhibited his art in Lithuania, Warsaw, Oslo, New York, London and Melbourne, and will take part in the upcoming Busan Biennale in South Korea. But the nature-lover is equally at home in the more secluded environs of Waiheke Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf.

“The idea of nature is a construct,” he asserts, adding that beauty is a mere fantasy humans project onto an indifferent environment. Although nature is something we equate with science, and therefore fact, Bizumic says nature is one of the many fictions we create to relate to our surroundings. “Fiction is part of reality, you can’t separate it. It’s essentially how you read things and how you relate to them, and that’s the beauty of art.” He is unconvinced by the way New Zealand is being marketed to tourists, saying that even something as seemingly untainted as a world heritage site is a construct that humans use to filter the way they relate to the world.

Suspicious of any binary distinction between nature and man-made things, Bizumic prefers to look at examples where reality becomes fiction. His earlier works depict the highly manicured grounds of parks and golf courses, a tranquility entirely of our own making. Surprisingly, the glassy pond in A Beautiful Afterlife, his 2002 window installation at the Auckland Art Gallery, was in fact a sewerage treatment facility.

While in Berlin Bizumic will be working on Seven Sister Cities, a multi-screen video work that will see him visiting Berlin’s sister cities (Istanbul, Moscow, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Paris, Budapest and Madrid) to collaborate with local artists. “I’m visiting green areas in these cities and I’m particularly interested in areas of the city where the green just exists without being designed by humans,” he says of the empty lots and other de facto green spaces that usually appear on the outskirts of a city. “It just kind of appears and has its own existence. Usually different cities have a green area, but we don’t realise how important it is. Like Central Park in Manhattan – you probably wouldn’t be able to breathe in New York without it.”

In considering the way we inhabit our surroundings, Bizumic is particularly interested in displacement. His 2004 work Aipotu considers the ruins of a modernist-style Norwegian whaling station built on Stewart Island in 1927. Another work proposes relocating Little Barrier Island – considered one of the world’s most important conservation islands – to the Harbour of Venice, a process he describes as reverse colonisation. “When Europeans came to New Zealand, essentially they brought a set of ideas and ideals of what the land should be like,” he explains. “You take this island, which is kind of untouched, and you take it to Europe – it’s kind of absurd. But if you come with an idea to make a place look like Europe, that’s not absurd. I think it is essentially the same thing.”

Although Bizumic does not want to bludgeon his viewers with green-politics and does not see his work as being primarily motivated by environmental issues, he says there is an urgency about people taking global warming seriously. He no longer drives a car and has decided not to eat “anything that walks.” “Our experience of place in the 21st century is now affected by movement, history, cultural knowledge, extreme climate change and an increasingly ‘virtual’ web of global communications. The question, ‘Where are we?’ seems to defy any single answer.”