Burhan's engagement in artistic creation
The creative work of Burhan Hadžialjević amazes us with its intense engagement in contemporary events, in current problems to which, unfortunately, most of us are already indifferent. Burhan, being an exceptionally sensitive observer and creator – he got his basic art knowledge at Academy of Art in Priština, which he graduated from in 1979 – responded to painful and traumatic chaos of the Balkan wars and wars in the world for almost one decade. For the last few years he has been more challenged by universal questions about people's relation to their living space, about their disrespectful treatment of material and spiritual goods. The author has been living in Marušići for almost two decades, therefore in a specific environment of archetypical rural Istria, which, however, loses its authenticity by people's everyday unkind and vain relation to it, somewhere even becomes a dumping ground for used and dumped indestructible modern material such as plastic and similar, as it is the case with the nearby abandoned quarry Kave. Unfortunately, the author experiences this universal human indifference to nature or concrete ambiance while travelling around the world, which, obviously, stimulates him to think about the future again and again: how, where, when, and how long. As a creator, he has been assigned to face those ecological problems personally and in chosen art media, which becomes and stays a universal warning and appeal to all of us.
For the last three years, by his projects – exhibitions of paintings, paintings-objects, installations, as well as by happenings, Burhan has been warning the public, also provocatively, about modern ecological problems common to all people. Carefully prepared and always for the concrete site – exhibition grounds, separately conceptualised projects in Grožnjan, Umag, Pula, Rijeka, Hum, and Buje, as well as in this gallery, Burhan is once again placed among innovative and creatively engaged artists, who - with his personal perceptible responsibility for the concrete environment, the world, entire universe, and with authorized and mysterious artistic interpretation – still addresses us, often shocks us too. In spite of the apparent prevailing tendency toward reaching any response from the public - mental, emotional, sensual, tactile … - single works and the exhibition as a whole have been visualized beforehand. Concrete idea, emotional movements, the author’s reflections on experienced and seen are the subject of his artistic addresses, where painting and sculptural elements and their synergies with the site are equally entangled. Experimenting with combined techniques, applying used and dumped materials: plastic, metal, glass, and other junked materials, which the author collects in his neighbourhood - he also paints some of them, and setting them up into interactive semantic and symbolic correlation, he creates an always new evident and informative conceptual entirety. Those are recognizable and persuasive values of Burhan’s artistic creation, also identified at this exhibition in the Herman Pečarič Gallery in Piran.
Burhan Hadžialjević presents himself with his individual exhibition to the Coast and Slovenia for the first time, although he has been particularly attached to Piran for years: he often participated and won a prize in the Piran International Ex-tempore, and is also active as a co organizer of the workshop Kornarija in Marušići.
The concept of this exhibition is based on more junked materials: plastic, glass, and metal; those dumped, abandoned and polluted materials define essential and experiential note of the project exhibited at the gallery and in the park next to it. Essential stimulus and idea of the exhibition are, by all means, felt very intimately and with several layers of meaning: the author's relation to the micro ambiance, its natural and civilized archetype, universe and its eternity, and his ability to sense and experience the past, present and, not at all optimistic vision of the future, which is dependant on the arrogant, primitive and aggressively destructive universal human relation to all those goods, are entangling. Without any piety, nostalgia, or idealization - contrary to the paradox in the use of that concrete “destructive” waste, their meaningful symbioses, to which he adds provocative and irritatingly comical applications – and, with the knowledge of classical and contemporary painting métier, realizes an authorial original artistic interpretation. Significant secular and sacral atmosphere has been attained; “real” nature and unpleasant junk it is unfamiliar with are present; defined by the author and aesthetically finished paintings-objects are shown, together with significant message of erotic applications, by which shock effects, otherwise known to art for decades, are also attained. With concrete senses, or merely with mental search for meanings, with defined and tactile structures, or with symbolic abstractly defined formal solutions, Burhan’s creation, consciously or unconsciously, but definitely provokes us, by which the purpose in universal artistic addressing is answered.
Nives Marvin, 2003