carlier | gebauer is happy to present Bojan Sarcevic’s new solo exhibition “The breath-taker is the breath-giver”, opening 3rd of March 2009. Sarcevic’s new series consists of four works, three of which are now on display for the first time at carlier | gebauer. The super-16mm film loops are each about three minutes long and are focussing each on a setting of objects embedded in music, which was conceived for them by Turkish contemporary composer Ulas Ozdemir. Sarcevic’s films are shown on modified 16mm projectors, set up in acrylic glas pavilions, which are projecting the image from the pavilion onto the surrounding walls of the space. His super-16mm films are differing from the usual 16mm format in that they imitate the 1,85:1 format of cinematic movies.

Sarcevic’s ‚Skulpturen Film’, to quote their working title, are comprised of film, music, sculpture and architecture, alluding to the modernist total works of art of the Bauhaus and of architectural functionalism as much as to their consequitive historical desintegration. Sarcevic’s pavilions are not structured by glittering clarity alone but every now and than the shadows are taking over the sceneries which the camera is slowly scanning. The sets of the films seem to mimmic the material studies of a cultural history in miniature, which is carefully released from its functionalist allusions. Ozdemir’s compositions are introducing their own context into this setting. Ozdemir’s ethnographical approach to music history as well as his use of traditional instruments produce yet another layer, in which the memory of modernism, which seems to be omnipresent in Sarcevic’s works, is recreated. Here, the forms are emancipating themselves from their functions and are ascribed to the capacities of gestaltung within their materialities.

In his exhibition, “The breath-taker is the breath-giver” Bojan Sarcevic is continuing his translations of sculptural scenes into filmic rides which were last shown in his solo exhibition “Only After Dark” which at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2008. In this show he had also worked with Ozdemir. But whereas in “Only After Dark” the films were more driven by Sarcevic’s own previous sculptural practice and opened up their formations into new sceneries, his new films are presenting material in three object groups. Thin, coloured paper is spun onto a thicker brown cardboard, looking like a set of stones cut open, an impression irritated by a red-blonde hairpiece, which seems to grow out of it. A fragile geometric wood construction, stretched by thin threads, is positioned in light sand like an attic column and a seemingly organic group of clayforms, covered in black cotton, in which some few pearls seem to be positioned somehow resemble dead bodies. Sarcevic’s film-sculptures never allow for a comforting place between the organic and the formal. Their material mixtures construct contexts which remind their viewers of later modernism, but yet carry with them no possibility of a definite localization in time or place. As in George Kubler’s break with modernism, „The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things“ (1962) also Sarcevic’s works seem to construct a cultural history within the objects themselves, in the expressions of their materials.