curatorial – Page 3 – Cultural Manager & Curator

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

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

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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