Artist:
Mladen Bizumic (born 1976 in Belgrade, Serbia; lives and works in Berlin, Germany).

Description:
“Fiji Biennale Pavilions is an exhibition that proposes an imagined, fantastical relationship between the South Pacific’s Fiji Islands and contemporary art. It presents a formal proposal for an international contemporary art biennale to be held in Fiji, a destination associated with holiday resorts, not high art. It questions the meaning of the cultural translation—as a biennale and a discussion about it.

“‘Within’ the proposed Fiji Biennale Pavilions are exhibited A4-size written proposals from artists Björn Dahlem, Sam Durant, Claus Fötinger, Emil Goh, David Hatcher, Ani O’Neill, Meena Park, Peter Robinson, and Kathy Temin. This Biennale is to be housed in the pavilions that are reconstructions of famous exposition pavilions—those temporary structures that have a significant portion of the twentieth-century architecture. The pavilions take the form of nine 1:150 scale Plexiglass models, installed on a display table. They are selected from range of the national pavilions such as Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s L’Ésprit Nouveau from the Exposition of Decorative Arts, Paris 1925; Marcel Breuer’s Gane’s Pavilion, Royal Show, Bristol 1936; and Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa’s Brazilian Pavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939.

“The final element of the exhibition is a sixteen panel map of Fiji islands. The map impresses the geography of Fiji on the viewer. Rather than a singular super-resort Fiji is revealed as an atomised archipelago.”
—Fabrizio Gallanti, “Mladen Bizunic, Fiji Biennale Pavilions,” Framingark (blog), July 22, 2010.