In the video installation “Bogey”, Bärtås and Ståhl develop parallel narratives revolving around the two neighboring areas in Blato, one of the Zagreb suburbs: the never completed building of the University hospital from the 1980s and the newly developed Golf & Country Club Zagreb. The presence of the huge building of the hospital next to the exclusive golf club points towards the dramatic changes and shifts in recent Yugoslavian and Croatian history.
The artists depart from the location of the hospital by repetitive reading of the text addressing the story of its history and its present. The last remaining guard keeps patrolling the hospital unable to prevent the continuous robbery of the building that gradually becomes stripped of all of its functioning parts and valuable metal. The gigantic skeleton of the hospital has kept resisting the influence of the weather but the nature is now invading its rooms and roofs.
And while the public hospital has been deteriorating, the private golf club has been expanding. By the 2010 court settlement, the owners of the golf club were ordered to pay 4,5 million Kunas as a compensation for the illegal digging along the Sava River, close to their premises. By that point they have excavated 300 000 cubic meters of sand and gravel, which probably caused the contamination of the groundwaters of Sava.
The reading at the hospital along with the many sounds from the building and its surrounding, form a common sound track for the two films and their two realities. The routine walk of the guard through the hospital building exposes the marks of thieves, squatters and graffiti artists, and enfolds in parallel with the movements of the golf cars of the neighboring gated community.
Magnus Bärtås is an artist, writer and professor of fine art at Konstfack in Stockholm. In his works he has been focusing on biographies, storytelling and architecture. His works is currently on view at Apex art in New York and he is developing new works for the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm) and the Art museum of Uppsala (Sweden).
Lars-Henrik Ståhl is an architect, artist and professor in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics, Lund University. He has been the leader of arts-based research project such as Los Angeles Islands- American architectural influences in a Swedish region, and recently, Placebo-replacement strategies in hospital architecture (Zagreb project being part of it). Ståhl is also the director of ResArc, Swedish research school in Architecture.
Supported by: Ministry of Culture, Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb – Office for Culture
The artists\’ research has been made possible through the collaboration with theMuseum of Contamporary Art Zagreb.
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