Currently based in Berlin, Mladen Bizumic has in recent years exhibited prolifically throughout Europe, yet still maintains regular connections with Auckland where he spent much of his youth. As the latest contributor to the billboard series, Bizumic toys with methods of communication within the cultural landscape.
The exhibition Everybody is Welcome presents a quote from a passage in Franz Kafka’s posthumously published novel Amerika. The passage occurs when the exiled protagonist Karl Rossman is in a state of hopelessness. Poor, depressed and unemployed, the immigrant stumbles across a poster seeking urgent employment in a theatre production, bringing hope to his desperate situation. Acknowledging the typical function of a billboard, Bizumic appropriates this poster text to recreate the novelistic scenario. He applies different translations to each billboard so that each repetition of the text echoes the local multicultural surrounds.