Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13.

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.