Chartwell Notes

The Night Shift belongs to a series of projects Mladen Bizumic undertook in the 2000s that proposed speculative architectures and imagined interventions. His 2002 project Tauranga Guggenheim, exhibited at Artspace Aotearoa and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, satirised the global franchising of the Guggenheim brand through the proposal of a Guggenheim outpost in Tauranga. The work took the form of an immersive installation, incorporating blueprint drawings, an architectural model, an animated tour of the proposed gallery interior, and a slowed-down version of Kenny G’s "Can You Feel the Love Tonight". Similarly, Fiji Biennale Pavilions (2006) critiqued the economic politics of the global art industry, particularly the relationship between tourism and the biennale model.

First exhibited at Sue Crockford Gallery in 2003, and coinciding with New Zealand’s second national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, The Night Shift proposes an even more dramatic reimagining of space: the imagined relocation of Hauturu Little Barrier Island from the Hauraki Gulf to the harbour of Venice, Italy. Through ink-on-paper schematics, colour photography, and animated video, Bizumic speculates on how such an impossible feat might be achieved, and what its consequences might be, inviting the viewer to enter a Borgesian realm of science fiction.