Artist:
David Maljkovic (born 1973 in Rijeka, Croatia; lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia).

Materials:
16mm color film, sound; 5 min 33 sec structure from steel profiles and plasterboards.

Description:
“Retired Form was shot in Memorial Park for the victims of WW2 Dotrscina in Zagreb around a monument by artist Vojin Bakic inaugurated in 1968. This monument was neglected and devastated during the 90s. Bakic’s work occupies a key position in the art of the former Yugoslavia; during the Cold War, abstraction in art made the arena for quite different ideologies and their interpretations but Bakic’s work rejected such simplifications by employing abstraction inside the social art system.”
—Press release, “Retired Compositions,” Metro Pictures website.

“The Retired Form film evokes a public monument complex in the Memorial Park Dotrscina, dedicated to the victims of WW2 in Zagreb, by sculptor Vojin Bakic. On the one hand, he is perceived as an ‘authentic’ modernist sculptor, the main figure of the break-up with socialist realism who forged the paths for abstraction and freedom of artistic expression in the 1950s, and on the other, as a ‘state artist’ in service to socialist ideology. Bakic is highly acclaimed in official art histories, yet his monuments to the anti-fascist struggle were devastated and destroyed in the heat of the nationalism and anti-Communism of the 90s.”
—”Retired Form,” Galerija Nova Newspapers no. 17, on Annet Gelink Gallery website.