E:MU
EDIN MUSTAFIC | VIENNA, AT | PORTFOLIO & ARCHIVE
Art & Photography
An artist should be fit for the best society, and keep out of it (J. Ruskin).
Since its invention, photography has suffered from an almost pathological misunderstanding: the naive assumption that it serves as objective evidence of reality. My work rigorously refuses this documentary servitude. Anyone who earnestly believes a lens captures the truth fails to recognize the apparatus for what it essentially is—a machine for constructed realities. Instead of cluttering an already visually oversaturated world with further redundant copies of itself, I use the photographic act as an enlargement of my ideas. Through radical reduction, subjects are stripped of their familiar context to definitively sabotage the sheer banality of mere depiction.
Art photography stubbornly refuses to play the role of a docile chronicler. Once you stop abusing the medium as a flat recording device, spaces open up for an unsparing conceptual realignment. The core of my practice lies in dismantling complacent viewing habits. Where the flat two-dimensionality of paper hits its exhausting limits, the image is ruthlessly forced into physical space. Through sculptural interventions and haptic materiality, the photographic sign leaves the wall to become a three-dimensional assertion.
Art & Mono
"The Radical Reduction to Black and White"
Blur as visual simulation: it deprives the image of mere documentation and replaces the object with its sign-like representation.
Where blur affects the entire image, the measurable yields to the impression: the object is replaced by its sign and symbol (cf. Stiegler, 2006).
The question remains whether truth is to be found in what is objectively measurable (sharpness) or in the essence of the matter (blur)!?
The super-ego as a controlling authority: a visual escape from the corset of societal expectations and the deconstruction of the internal ideal image.
Dispensing with anchorage: refusing a title denies the image a predetermined meaning and leaves the constitution of sense entirely to the viewer's own gaze.
![Edin Mustafic Fotografie, Serie Pazifismus: Gesellschaftskritische Fotokunst, [hier das Motiv beschreiben, z.B.: gebrochenes Gewehr oder weiße Fahne], visuelles Plädoyer für Gewaltlosigkeit.](https://www.edinmustafic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/p1-9-1-768x768.jpg)
Pacifism as a cultural illusion: reflexive photography interrogates one's own habitus and confronts the ethical stance with the brutal materiality of the object.
Series: Melancholia, 2015
The horizon line as an interface between standstill and disappearance: here, melancholia is understood not as grief, but as a contemplative space of pure reduction and timeless presence.
Simulation and loss of reality: the work questions the boundary between media staging and tangible reality. Through targeted visual disruptions, the loss of certainty becomes tangible—the image confronts the gaze with the fragility of our perception.
Bitter reality: a cynical commentary on a society that only buys into serious issues once they are made harmless and consumable with a few colorful little flowers.
Physis and affect: the eruption of uncontrolled aggression as an endogenous instinctual state. Photography captures the somatic moment of losing control, confronting the archaic force of the impulse with the demand for self-knowledge.
Materiality as visual event: the analogue support medium steps outside its serving role and becomes physical reality itself. The sculptural folding of the film breaks with the pure pictorial surface, transforming the material into an autonomous formal object.
Order and the obsession with control: the strict grid architecture suggests stability and calm, yet reveals itself as a societal constraint. Pinhole photography deconstructs the structure into visual deception, unmasking the belief in control as a mere illusion.
Aesthetics of the ephemeral: radical reduction to branch and decay isolates finitude within empty space. The work addresses transience not as loss, but as a silent, inevitable process of dissolution and time.
Art & Color
Künstler wird man aus Verzweiflung! One becomes an artist out of despair! (E.L. Kirchner)
Anyone who assumes my practice operates exclusively in radical black-and-white is mistaken: I work with equal rigor in color. Black-and-white remains wonderfully detached, analytical, and strict—yet at times a work demands color to bypass rationality and strike with immediate physical impact. Colors provoke states where the gaze cannot remain coolly detached: from pulsating urgency and raw sensuality to the sharpest elegance. Never a decorative element, never a softener—rather the unfiltered spectrum whenever the work insists upon it.
Gestural abstraction and East Asian aesthetics: the branching line system dissolves the tree as an object, rhythmically rearranging color and structure. Echoing Jackson Pollock's all-over approach, branches and touches of color coalesce into a meditative mesh of pure form.
The human being reduced to naked materiality—an amorphous lump of flesh. The sculpture refuses any idealizing form, confronting the gaze with the raw, biological finitude of the body.
Tulips, 2018
Experimental refraction of light in water: isolated against deep black, the tulips unfold a sculptural presence. The interplay of wetting, reflection, and darkness transforms the botanical form into an abstract study of body, light, and space.
FORM, MATERIAL & SIGN
Aesthetics & Rupture
“Societal contradiction as a physical fact in space!”
“I don’t like people. I don’t like art. I can’t stand other artists! I can’t stand other female artists! I can’t stand myself. I find the art world revolting. I find the public unbearable. I don’t want to see other artists! I don’t want to hear about art history! I don’t like galleries, I want no galleries, I like none of it! But I mean it exactly like this: this is my aesthetic. DADA means nothing, DADA demands nothing, DADA struck absolutely everyone—and me right along with them!” Stadtwanderer / EM, 2018
Stadtwanderer / EM, 2018
The purloined sign as readymade: isolated from traffic space, the sign loses its normative function and turns into an autonomous object of color and form within the exhibition space.
Monumental simulation: the steles claim the hardness and weight of massive concrete, yet consist of styrofoam and construction adhesive. Democracy as a fragile facade—a deceptive mass feigning stability, while remaining featherlight and hollow inside.
Contemporary, 2015
Mutation of the tool: prompted by the attacks in Great Britain where everyday chopping tools became weapons. The hatchet loses its profane function, freezing against the wall as a contemporary symbol of diffuse threat and mediatized terror.
Superposition, 2018
Schrödinger's pictorial support: the packaging turns its interior outward, becoming a serial wall object in itself. Behind it, there could be everything or nothing—a state of suspension where photography becomes an actual assertion only through doubt about its existence.
Deconstruction of myth: baroque figurative fragments are detached from their religious visual context and transferred into an artificial space. Painterly superimpositions and drippings disrupt the pathos, condensing baroque colorism into an autonomous visual dynamic.
As a consistent continuation of the preceding series, this body of work deepens digital deconstruction. The interplay of fragmentation and graphic condensation sharpens the eye for the essential—a formal reduction that uncovers the motif step by step.
Perspective(s), 2024 (work in progress)
The series liberates the photograph from the two-dimensional surface and transposes it into space as a sculptural object. The crumpling breaks with the illusion that photography could ever depict the whole: it always remains merely a single, static perspective. Through folding, tears, and applied force, surfaces and ruptures emerge that continually reconstitute themselves with every step through the room and every shift in viewing angle.
Abstract, 2024
Everyday objects shed their utilitarian function, turning into pure abstraction against black. In an unusual composition, sharpness and blur resonate against one another—interplaying with spatial depth to compel the gaze into a detailed exploration of the line.
Linotype, 2023
Mechanical printmaking and material reduction
Art Doku
Traces of life, captured beyond any staging.
This section brings together works that do not arise from theoretical detachment, but are wrestled directly from life: self-portraits, fleeting everyday observations, fractures, and personal interludes. This is not about polished staging, but about the unvarnished trajectory as a human being and artist. The camera operates as an intimate notebook to capture internal states, negotiate crises, and secure traces of a reality that defies any direction. An open, living archive—searching, immediate, and uncompromisingly subjective. EM, 2026
EM, 2026
Fragments of a faded journey: In the wake of this Andalusian trip, these images document fleeting encounters and forgotten corners. They constitute the residue of a personal archive.
Andaluz, 2024
The land of flamenco and the austere beauty of the south: pine shadows, glaring light, and an almost palpable melancholia.
Sunset, 2014
Analogue travel documentation on the Croatian Adriatic: a fleeting moment between motion and stasis, condensing the expanse of the sea into a silent snapshot.