Commisioned by billboard gallery europe (bg) for the exhibition Fantasies of the Beginning, public space of a city quarter Bratislava–Petrzalka
The artist graphically reduced Bratislava–Petrzalka’s city plan into a vertical labyrinth form of raw blocks.To the outsider passing by the quarter he offers an orientation map of giant mural paintings from side façades of blocks of flats.The map is a result of artist’s field research and documents collection of more than 130 mural paintings. Their size correlates with the modernistic monumentality of this housing development, which is beyond human scale. Wall paintings help achieve orientation in a monotone urban structure, while their temporality and changeability generate another subsidiary labyrinth.The Serb urbanologist Bogdan Bogdanovic likened socialist-era housing developments to a maze insofar as the labyrinth is for the outsiders a metaphor of chaos, while for insiders it is the space of own significance.
Mira Keratova