Baroque Sunbursts

Markovic’s practice interrogates the imagined remnants of queer archives, merging photographic material, performance ephemera, and conceptual writing into large-scale compositions that feel both spectral and visceral. His ongoing body of work, ‘Baroque Sunbursts’, uses the language of light, lens, and techno to gesture toward an invented visual history—one that revels in its own instability. ‘Baroque Sunbursts’ stems from an initial encounter with an abandoned nightclub hidden beneath a defunct Atlanta motel, Show Me Love began as an exercise in speculative documentation. With no photographic evidence of the space due to its illegality, Markovic turned instead to invention: imagining what the light might have looked like, how the air might have felt, how the patrons may have interacted with the club.

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The works that emerge from this process collapse the aesthetics of entertainment and archival impulse. Using kinetic lighting, expired darkroom materials, and large-format slide film, Markovic crafts surfaces that flicker between presence and erasure. As dance culture is increasingly folded into a commodified present, Baroque Sunbursts resists clean narratives. The installation leans into the oversaturation of utopian imagery while remaining skeptical of its promises. Echoing Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” and techno’s Detroit origins, Markovic reminds us that materials born of capitalism can be repurposed without endorsement. Here, discarded gels, studio lights, and surplus analog supplies become the detritus of a visual vocabulary shaped by both joy and loss.