Since 2018, BKBF (Bober Kunst Bildhauer Fabrik), composed of sculptors-painters Nedim Hadži Ahmetović Mafa, Robert Jurak and Izidor Zadravec, has been positioned in the art-critical space as a group/movement of researchers and interpreters of gaps in historical facts. The artists extrapolate the sculptural craft from the verifiably static to the surrealism of images beyond actuality with the desire to provoke fundamental reflection.
Pegasus Junker / P-JU 21 is rooted in the historically recent timeline of the past century, texploring the dynamics of social change and its potential manipulation. The beginning of the 20th century famously represents an explosion of civil social and cultural changes: suffrage providing both sexes with a universal right to vote, the beginnings of women’s emancipation rights, the Balkan wars with the Ottoman Empire, the Russo-Japanese War, constructivism and artistic movements, and last but not least, World War I and horrors that later reverberate through World War II and the proliferation of political conflicts that escalate into wars right up to the present era.
The sculpture of an enlarged flying horse has its roots in Greek mythology and finds its ultimate expression through the anatomical distortion and intersection with the aerodynamic engineering elements of a World War II fighter plane. Through its surreality and uselessness, the BKBF sculpture alludes to the senselessness of violence: all the effort invested in the creation of the object, results in only aesthetic utility and in no way in concreteness – combat utility.
The Junkers or the Stuka, a killing war machine from World War II, which evoked terror mainly with its sound, is welded to the torso of Pegasus in order to deprive the sculpture of any combative aspect, thus in a way becoming a caricature of itself. As a top engineering achievement of the 20th century, the Stuka acquires a new dimension as a peaceful “Mickey the horse” with its aesthetics.
Organisation: BKBF, Društvo 29a and Kino Šiška.
