Decorating the (Bau) haus
Tina Kesting
Haven’t I seen this before? Black and white pictures of clear, simple and militaristic architectural shapes and interior designs are not a groundbreaking new topic. Since the era of Bauhaus, photography of buildings designed under the principle that "form follows function" have been shown over and over again. So what is new about Bojan Sarcevic’s photo series "1954"? The artist does not want to portray functional and rationally constructed buildings. His interior design portraits of public buildings, schools, theaters, libraries or hospitals are collages taken out of the architectural magazine Baumeister of 1954. He takes various ornamental structures out of the magazine’s photographs with precise cuts and reintegrates them into an odd composition of new works. All of his 76 small-scale collages play with the abstract and concrete in a timid but fascinating way.
All of these rooms were new and progressive in 1954 when Germany started to recover from the crash of World War II, when the whole nation hoped for a new life and better times. People were exhausted by the past decade and were fascinated by how quickly Germany grew out of nothing, having been at the absolute bottom just nine years before. Now, 50 years later, such times seem to be forgotten.
The buildings were photographed right after their construction finished, just before anyone had lived and worked in them.
By fracturing old forms and recombining them into a new composition, Sarcevic shows how important the context between space and time is. He transforms old ornaments into contemporary contexts and no one recognizes their original background. Typical elements of former periods seem to be lost in contemporary frames. The spectator is stirred and reacts with wonder. Subjects related to fixed circumstances flow through the room and the viewer’s thoughts without finding rest. The frames of the new works appear in contradiction to the subject where shapes of the past become fantasies of the future.
The Belgrade-born artist broaches the issue of the difficulties of breaking off from and destroying the old structure of room and time in his precise and beautiful manipulations. In doing so, he underlines how closely these two aspects are connected and related.
