curatorial

Everything and Nothing

Everything and Nothing

Artists: Sanela Jahić, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Vladimir Logutov, Timofey Radya and Mark Požlep

The perception of the fourth dimension explored by the exhibition Everything and Nothing is not a transcendental, analogue-spatial or temporal dimension, but is rather determined by current social, political and cultural dimensions and uses the avant-garde tradition as a meta-language that progresses from everything to nothing, which equals everything by purifying artistic activity until it becomes a clear, engaged statement, still determined by the restrictive parameters of our actions. Although it is unlikely real change will occur, the fact that we can engage with the idea brings us closer.

When Ilya Kabakov created The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment(1988), he was not concerned with utopia. Individual re-appropriation freed the cosmic dream from being closed within the system and re-established its primary essence – an essence which is not fixed, has no definite form and is not institutionalized, and whose genuineness can only be collective. Based on these parameters, the exhibition presents a collective urge for change, or a possibility of change, in all its vitality, independent of image transfer and original context, which goes beyond imitation and appropriation.

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Guest curator in the annual cycle Local Talk

Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

31 July – 24 August 2014

In collaboration with: Galleria Continua, Garage gallery
Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana
Photos: Dejan Habicht. ŠKUC Archive. Courtesy of the artists Timofey Radya and Vladimir Logutov.

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Regina Jose Galindo

The Anatomy Lesson

Artist: Regina José Galindo

This retrospective exhibition of the artist recipient of the Grand Prize of the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts presents an overview of her work, within which, despite the expanding subject areas and altered mechanisms, the poetic component remains constant. The Anatomy Lesson raises questions of allocation of gender, cultural and social identities.

Regina José Galindo operates in a constant oscillation between the two poles – between poetic language and physical action, individuality and collectivity, between the local and the global. In this way, she highlights the diversification of identities that speak of existential conflict through the metaphorization of historicity.

The performances of Regina José Galindo function as a meticulous process of social diagnosing, an incessant posing of questions, through which the artist invites us to a common experience of opening up new spaces – spaces for change. The flexibility of the circulation of knowledge, which Galindo’s works establish repeatedly, erases the classical scheme of production and reception, extending an invitation to cross one’s own borders, calling for a transformation of one’s field of experience.

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The 30th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts: Interruption

Exhibition of the Grand Prize Recipient of the 29th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts

Curator: Yasmín Martín Vodopivec

Jakopič Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

14 September – 14 November 2013

Support: The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana
Photos: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

New commissioned work: Common Ground

 

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Cartography of In-Between Space

Cartography of In-Between Space

Artist: Miroslav Cukovic

The exhibition Cartography of In-Between Space showcases the work of Miroslav Cukovic, an artist of the younger generation, which has been produced in the last three years. His works are based on the unpredictable possibilities of paper as a medium, fertilised by the interventions of collage and printmaking techniques. By addressing the materiality of form as secondary and ephemeral, he has established a spontaneous but pervasive dialogue in his work with the oeuvre of William S. Burroughs.

The works of Miroslav Cukovica build a narrative by creating in-between spaces in emptiness, within which there is constant transition. The artist sees transition as a transformation that bears within itself the idea of the final destination and the future. His works reject the anti-utopian methods of analyses, in which merely objective indices apply. Cukovic takes a different path, creating his own maps of potentiality beyond the closed horizon of the existing social order. This interstitial geography is made up of different mediums: collage, print, ready-made, artist’s book. The artist uses them to explore the cartography of in-between space as his own art practice, developing concepts of space, identity, as well as the re-contextualisation of the individual.

Miroslav Cukovic composes utopian conceptual maps that represent the landscape of his conscious intimate transition and mappings of the current social context. This triggers the need to consider the present as a common space, which conceals the potential of the development and transformation of the individual and the social status.

Miroslav Cukovic (1982) is an American artist of Yugoslav descent. In 2005 he completed his studies at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit (Michigan, USA), where he was also a printmaking lecturer for a time. He also worked as an assistant in the Graphic Arts Department at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He regularly exhibits his prints, drawings, sculptures as well as installations around Europe and in the US, where he has been the recipient of several awards. In 2009, he carried out the intervention Orange Movement in Maribor, and last year, the project The Maribor Milky Way, which was part of the Maribor European Capital of Culture programme.

International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia

19 February 2013 –  7 April 2013

Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana
Photos: Jaka Babnik.  MGLC Archive.

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Bedtime Stories

Bedtime Stories

Artists: Pila Rusjan and Nung-Hsin Hu

The circumstances which led to the formation of the experimental interactive video project by Pila Rusjan and Nung-Hsin Hu are linked to the ECVP collaborative project known as The Exquisite Corpse Video Project. This is an original cross-cultural collaboration of artists working in experimental video and is inspired by the surrealist method of the ‘cadavre exquis’. The surrealist method was based on the randomness of the story assembled by the words or phrases added by different collaborators, whereas with ESVP, each participant produces a video piece created in response to the last ten seconds of the video by the preceding artist. Ten participants of the ECPV project formed the TRAFFIC JAM #1 video group. The artists first met at the Casa das Caleiras residency in São Paulo in 2010. TRAFFIC JAM #2, in which Pila Rusjan and Nung-Hsin Hu made the creative connection, went on in Taipei, as part of the Treasure Hill Artist Village residency programme from January to March 2012. In the intense atmosphere of creative collaboration, the two artists conceived the collaborative Bedtime Stories project.

The project springs from their own experience of loneliness in a foreign country and at the same time discusses the paradoxical situation of increasing solitude in a world characterized by intense communication aided by modern technologies. The interactive book and bed make up the audio-visual installation that creates an intimate and pleasant atmosphere, where visitors could browse through the book and choose their bedtime story. The stories that were projected onto the bed were presented in different forms, blurring the line between reality and dreams.

Curator: Yasmín Martín Vodopivec
International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia

20 April 2012 – 17 June 2012

Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana
Photos: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

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Trust me I trust you

Trust me I trust you

Artist: Mihael Giba

Mihael Giba is a Croatian intermedia artist, who is presenting the first solo exhibition of his work in Slovenia. His art focuses on the area of data visualization, and he has developed special computer software that serves as the basis for his installations. The common element in Giba’s projects is their mapping of both individual and global social phenomena.

The exhibition TRUST ME I TRUST YOU presents an installation of this same name, which is composed of a series of five artist books, in which legal documents and international agreements signed by the Croatian government have been translated by Giba in his own visual language in an ironic attempt to become a useful transmitter between viewers and the language of bureaucracy. Besides the books, the exhibition is rounded out by a projection that categorizes data from a session of parliament into such groupings as sports, culture, economics, etc., and presents them as images of a digital landscape.

The artist’s chosen mode of mapping derives from his desire to create a dialogue between the state and its citizens that is as direct as possible. Through the visualization of data, he moves from the concrete to the abstract only to return again to the concrete. This movement has been described by Lev Manovich as the real challenge of data art, which, as he states in Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime (2002), is “not about how to map some abstract and impersonal data into something meaningful and beautiful”, but rather “how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society”.

Curator: Yasmín Martín Vodopivec
P74 Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

9 March 2012 – 28 March 2012

Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist and Dejan Habicht. P74 Archive.

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X-OP CULTURAL POLICY GROUP

X-OP Cultural Policy Group

Artists: Tatu Engeström, Kalle Hamm, Ritva Harle, Minna Henriksson, Mikko Lipiäinen, Antti Majava and Tero Nauha

The group was formed in the early summer 2010 when Bo Karsten, director of Art School Maa, and Johanna Fredriksson, producer working in the Helsinki-leg of X-OP network, invited some artists for meetings in Maa-Tila project space. According to the initial plan the purpose of the meetings was to come up with an artistic program for the then forthcoming X-OP Festival, which was organized to coincide with the X-OP meeting in Helsinki. In the meetings more urgent, than to propose individual artworks to the festival, seemed to be discussing the trends in the cultural policy of Finland.

At the time acute issues were the plans to completely restructure the Finnish Arts Council (but partly due to strong opposition by artist unions it did not happen), and the new cultural policy plan of the Ministry of Education and Culture, which was being prepared with a long-term span of the next 35 years (the plan got published last winter). Also, strong concerns were directed toward the overall shift in the cultural discourse and atmosphere in Finland toward neo-liberalism. Parts of this are high profile projects by the government, the cities and the private sector, where art is merely a branding tool of neighbourhoods, cities and the country. Also characteristic to neo-liberalism are preferences on an institutional level toward commercially oriented activities such as art fairs, private galleries and consulting agencies rather than supporting knowledge production in museums and research centres.

What all members of the cultural-political group X-OP have in common is that they regard art as an instrument for participating in debate and discussion in society rather than as a channel for autonomous and personal self-expression, and therefore address current local social and political issues in their work.

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Curator: Yasmín Martín Vodopivec
KiBela / KIBLA Maribor, Slovenia

23 May 2011 – 30 May 2011

Production: MMC KIBLA
Support: EU-EACEA, Culture Programme, Brussels, Slovenian Ministry of Culture, Municipality of Maribor and Office of Youth
KiBela programme is part of the European X-OP project.
Photos: KID KIBLA Archive.

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Quarter to Two

Quarter to Two

Artist: Tadej Pogačar

In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art invited Tadej Pogačar and his institution P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. museum to intervene at the exhibition of works that had been recently included in the gallery’s collection. With his work, entitled Fifteen to Two, Pogačar intervened in the exhibition by changing the gallery space into a waiting room. Above the main entrance into the room he hung a non-operating clock, set to fifteen minutes to two – the time when employees were already getting ready to leave their work posts for home. The exits leading into other exhibition spaces were marked with signs of the four directions, but not in the right order, and there were two rows of chairs in the middle of the space.

With minimal means and the formal gap between this work that has never found its way into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the exhibited ones that had become part of this collection, the artistic intervention appealed to the idea of waiting of the artist and the artworks for the competent institutions who have the authority to recognise, historicize, elevate or dump works of art.

Reformulation of the artwork Fifteen to Two in 2011 does not mean the trendy re-enactment, but stripping, a radicalization of the position of production of knowledge. Pogačar enters the institution as a place of exposure, a space where classification and allocation are carried out, where there are mechanisms of the institution at work: its order, its filters, codes and collections, enabling the construction of the history.

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Curators: Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, Mojca Založnik

The final exhibition of  the 13th edition of The World of Art, School for Curatorial Practices and Critical Writing, (2010/2011)

 Alkatraz Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

13 April 2011  – 6 May 2011

Production: SCCA, Center for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana / World of Art
Co-production: KUD Mreža / Alkatraz Gallery
Support: Municipality of Ljubljana City, Ministry of Culture of the RS
Photos: Sunčan Stone. SCCA Archive.

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