Mladen Bizumic: Kodak Employed 140, 000 People. Instagram 13. / Laurence Kavanagh: Segue / We’ve Got Mail III

MOSTYN, Wales’ (UK) foremost contemporary visual arts centre, is delighted to announce a new season of exhibitions:

Mladen Bizumic: Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13.
Gallery 3

Taking a snapshot glance, Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13. by Austrian-based, and New Zealand-raised, artist Mladen Bizumic focuses on the company Kodak—a point of exposure in Bizumic’s work—and pictures the transition from film-based photography to digital imaging as it developed.

Through photography and sculpture Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13. filters a timeline of Kodak’s development, from its founding in 1880 to its subsequent demise in 2012 when the company filed for bankruptcy. Splicing in a chronological parallel—which enlarges on conservative, corporate hubris, as well as its failings and obsolescence—the exhibition also offers a salutary tale of the shortcomings of being overexposed while not being committed to full development. The pace of digital technology is relentless and its replacement of many analogue devices is undeniable. Yet, that Kodak invented the world’s first digital camera, a medium that would force the company to file for bankruptcy, is difficult to believe and brought both into focus and blurred in a number of Bizumic’s works.

Recording a history of photography, lighting it both positively and negatively, the exhibition’s parts come to form a canon of sorts of technology’s progression, and it leads right through to the present with today’s available means of taking snapshots, and sharing them. 

The exhibition is curated by Adam Carr, Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN, in dialogue with the exhibition by artist Laurence Kavanagh, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, MOSTYN. Both exhibitions are part of the “Conversation Series,” an ongoing series placing two solo exhibitions in conversation. 

Bizumic’s exhibition is kindly supported by Creative New Zealand, The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna. 

Laurence Kavanagh: Segue
Galleries 4 & 5

Through a combination of media such as sculpture, collage and photo-montage, Kavanagh’s work engages with the idea of visual representation: more specifically, photographic and cinematic practices become a ground of research for what it means to see and to be seen, to represent and to be represented, and ultimately how to navigate the relational space between “image life” (what we make visually of the world) and “real life” (what the world actually is). 

For the series “March” presented in MOSTYN, Kavanagh recently worked on site at the Curzon Mayfair cinema in London, taking casts from architectural details and rubbings of surfaces of the building, reworking them as traces that generate reminders, conversations and references for other works to appear. The images embedded in the collages are generated by Kavanagh’s memories of certain films that were shown at the Curzon since it opened in 1934, most recently The Revenant and Anomalisa—both were screening and audible through the walls while he was making his work there.

In the group of works, “October,” Kavanagh cast a series of projection screens used by a cinema cooperative in the North of England. One cast is delicately layered upon another, embedding the memories, echoes and residue that accompany them. In MOSTYN, Kavanagh takes this idea further, using the physical relationship with the Victorian architecture of Gallery 4 and 5 to test how meaning is produced within the screen.

The exhibition is curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, MOSTYN, in dialogue with the exhibition by Mladen Bizumic, curated by Adam Carr, Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN. Both exhibitions are part of the “Conversation Series​,” an ongoing series placing two solo exhibitions in conversation. 

Kavanagh’s exhibition is kindly supported by Marlborough Contemporary, London, and APT (Artist Pension Trust). 

We’ve Got Mail III
Gallery 2

Participating artists: Lisa Carter, Liam Gillick, Joe Orr, Gabriel Sierra (as of November 8, with additional artists’ works being added on arrival by mail)
and artefacts, images and stories of the local area

We’ve Got Mail III is part of MOSTYN’S “History Series” of exhibitions, which responds to the context in which the shows are presented, in this case that of a former Royal Mail sorting office into which MOSTYN’s galleries were expanded in 2010. The focus of this, the third We’ve Got Mail exhibition, is Llandudno Post Office, next door to the gallery, which has provided a significant community service since its opening in 1904. 

The exhibition also includes new works by contemporary artists, sent to MOSTYN via the postal service and seen for the first time when opened by the curator. They address an invitation to produce new work in relation to We’ve Got Mail III as a reflection of the personal approach to exhibition-making, where direct communication between organiser and participant is key. New artworks will enter the exhibition throughout its duration, arriving when the mail comes in and, together with additional historical material from the community, forming a presentation that will grow over the exhibition’s run. 

This exhibition is curated by Adam Carr (Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN), Richard Cynan Jones (Operations and Facitilies/Research, MOSTYN) and Jane Matthews (Engagement Manager/Research, MOSTYN). 

The “History Series” of exhibitions is funded by The National Lottery through the Arts Council of Wales, and Heritage Lottery Fund.

On the occassion of the We’ve Got Mail series an edition by Jonathan Monk has been produced in the artist’s ongoing postcard series “Picture Post Card Posted From Post Box Pictured.” The edition can be purchased by contacting shop [​at​] mostyn.org. 

To be kept up to date with MOSTYN’s programme, please subscribe to our mailing list by emailing lin [​at​] mostyn.org