Recycling and Refining [DNLM: Go Big or Go Home]

The text was originally published in the brochure of the exhibition of DNLM: Go Big or Go Home at Galerija SC, Zagreb (27 February – 9 March 2026).

Recycling and Refining

Nowadays, more than ever before in history, the world seems to be saturated with all kinds of manufactured objects. The objects are multiplying, their numbers growing uncontrollably, just like the needs and expectations of the people using them. And there is no other way. Current ideological and economic apparatuses push societies into the hamster wheel that requires them to produce and consume, more and more, to grow more and to make more profits. Like in everyday life, the market-oriented logic is also a driving force of the cultural industry and the world of art; there are more and more (professional) artists educated at the increasing number of art schools. Therefore, there are more and more artworks available on the market, while the museum depots, that keep the cultural treasures of empires and nation states, are becoming increasingly full.

DNLM, Go Big or Go Home, 2026. Galerija SC, Zagreb. Photo: Šimun Bućan, arhiv SC.

In that sense the cultural industry uses the same tactics as global trade. Artists have to produce more and more, but not too much in order not to devalue their works, and therefore the market requires ever new customers, be it private collectors or public museums. Furthermore, the institutions and individuals need more and more space to showcase and store the works with (potentially) huge added value. The infamous hyperproduction in the arts is the direct consequence of that. The late artist Ivan Ladislav Galeta reflected on the increasing increase in art making by proposing the most radical and ecological gesture that any contemporary artist could resort to: not to produce art, at least not in material form. For him pieces of art became unnecessary junk.

In his work Go Big or Go Home the artist DNLM reflects on such issues, however, he takes a completely different approach. Instead of the artistic austerity or iconoclasm proposed by Galeta, he appropriates the dominant modes of art making: he makes artworks out of seemingly worthless materials. By doing so, he aims to expose some fundamental absurdities and paradoxes of the art world that – like the corporate economy – requires ongoing growth. In a way, DNLM subverts such notions by seemingly doing exactly what is expected from a contemporary artist: to produce added value, in his case, to produce a valuable work of art out of discarded and useless found objects.

DNLM, Go Big or Go Home, 2026. Galerija SC, Zagreb. Photo: Šimun Bućan, arhiv SC.

In 2023, he conducted an experiment while staying at the artist-in-residence programme in Prague. In order to make an exhibition at UMPRUM, he set out to collect various objects he could find in the public or private spaces of the city. His choice of objects was not coincidental but carefully curated, as he obtained quintessential elements of urban landscape iconography – fences, benches, street lamps and rubbish bins. Since he had to adapt these objects to his own production capacities, and to the exhibition budget, he cut them up in such a way that he could fit them in his (small) car. Later, he pieced them back together again in the gallery.

Furthermore, he exhibited the same pieces in Ljubljana, where he had more favourable conditions, and therefore he cut the objects again and fitted them onto transporting cargo palettes and into a van; a clear improvement by the standards of the cultural industry. The objects inevitably became even more scarred and shabby, cut and pieced back together twice, but in the world of art that could also mean an added value, since every exhibition and every reference can potentially increase the price of an artwork. After the exhibition at Ravnikar Gallery in Ljubljana these objects were transformed into artefacts, since the crates for art transport were made to store them.

DNLM, Go Big or Go Home, 2026. Galerija SC, Zagreb. Photo: Šimun Bućan, arhiv SC.

For the exhibition at Gallery SC in Zagreb the objects are pieced together again. Here as well, DNLM ironically points at the discrepancy between the context of how the works were produced, in a process of urban scavenging, and how they are presented, like artefacts in the clean and white gallery. With this gesture – which is by no means new or original – he touches upon the unwritten rules of the cultural industry. He also points to the multi-speed world where some canonised objects, without any real monetary value, have the ability to increase their value immensely. It is a blueprint for social inequality, since managers’ and capital owners’ incomes can exceed the salaries of the majority of people by a hundred or a thousand times, even though they invested the same amount of time, energy and knowledge in the labour. Go Big or Go Home thus points at asymmetries and injustices in the world of art and within the stratified societies of today.