Ljubljana Art Weekend | 25 – 28 May2023.
A 4-day programme of exhibitions and events to engage with artists, curators, collectors and art professionals. Like its many European models, the Ljubljana Art Weekend initiative aims to bring together organisations and institutions, galleries, museums and project spaces dedicated to the presentation and promotion of contemporary art, thus contributing to a thriving local art scene and the promotion of its plurality and vitality. The dynamic programme, organised in cooperation with a network of partners and including more than 100 exhibitions, openings, guided tours with curators, art walks, workshops, round tables, performances and talks with artists, is free and open to the public.
MG+MSUM Program:
Friday, 26 May | 10 a. m. - 6 p. m. | International conference: Museums for the Future
Location: +MSUM
In his famous essay from the early 1990s, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” the American art historian and activist Douglas Crimp describes art museums as sepulchers of artworks. This international conference, organized at a time of recurring crises, presents museums and art institutions that have been destroyed physically and/or symbolically, focusing – instead of on their destruction and ruins – on that vital part of museum institutions that continues to work for the good of the artists and the wider community, despite and in the face of often impossible circumstances. In this way it underscores that radical hope rises from the ruins.
The conference will consist of three panel discussions, moderated by the Moderna galerija's curators Bojana Piškur, Igor Španjol and Adela Železnik.
Saturday, 27 May 2023 at 11 a. m. | Workshop for children | Exercises in a Collection
Location: +MSUM
Sunday, 28 May 2023 at 3 p. m. | Guided tour | 20th Century. Continuities and Ruptures
Location: MG+
The guided tour follows a thematic path (from the arrival of modernism in art on Slovenian territory, the avant-garde of the 1920s, partisan art, OHO and the retro-avant-garde of the 1980s) that draws the visitor's attention to the big question of the connections between art, politics and life, leaving them free to choose the one that best suits their interests.
Maximum number of participants: 25. Registration not required. For more details contact: izobrazevanje@mg-lj.si.
Sunday, 28 May 2023 at 5 p. m. | Guided tour | Exercises in a Collection
Location: +MSUM
On a guided tour, visitors will learn about the legacy of the OHO movement and the art collectives and practices that emerged from it, the related work of other artists in the Arteast 2000+ collection, projects by contemporary artists, as well as works that have been purchased for the international Arteast 2000+ collection in recent years, and works that in some way suggest a line that this collection might follow in the future. These are artists of the younger or middle generation from the former Yugoslavia, and the subject matter of the works is mostly the work of women artists, with a focus on (traditional) handicrafts, the significance of this return to handicrafts today (the position of women in society, patriarchy, unpaid work, tradition – modernity), and what different histories and stories these handicrafts tell us.
Maximum number of participants: 25. Registration not required. For more details contact: izobrazevanje@mg-lj.si.
Sunday, 28 May 2023 at 6:00 p. m. | WILHELM GROENER: performing archive @ the Temporary Slovene Dance Archives
Location: +MSUM TSDA (first floor)
Language: English
The presentation of the German artist duo WILHELM GROENER* is a playful hybrid between lecture and performance. It reflects their current artistic research entitled "performing archive", which goes beyond their oeuvre of more than 20 years and deals with the possibilities of linking the opposing concepts of the archival and the performative. The archives' methods, rhythms and connotations provide the structural threads from which visuals, body, sound and space are woven into a performative fabric with multiple narratives and enduring transformations.
Exhibitions on view
20th Century. Continuities and Ruptures
Location: MG+
Permanent exhibition of selected works from the national collection of Museum of Modern Art breaks with traditional linearity by introducing the topics of the 20th century avant-gardes and of the art of the Partisan resistance, bringing them into the national history of art on an equal footing with more familiar trends and, as a consequence, casting new light on the latter.
The exhibition begins with the entry of modernism into Slovenian art and ends with the ten-day war for Slovenian independence. The main novelties in this exhibition are the presentation of the avant-garde of the 1920s and the second reconstruction of the Trieste Constructivist Space (1927), headed by Dragan Živadinov and Miha Turšič (Production House Delak).
Multimedia installation | Neža Knez Touches, Changes, Viscous Time
Location: +MSUM
Neža Knez’s multimedia installation Touches, Changes, Viscous Time presents the artist’s methodological approach that is in itself part of the artwork and the prism through which the individual elements are to be viewed – not separately, but as enmeshed in a dynamic network of relations that become the core and the structure of the work. The numerous elements constituting the installation function as connecting threads between artistic forms, further structuring our communicational existence.
A similar process of transformation as the one taking place in the artist’s studio during her experiments unfolds at the site of the installation, as visitors interact with the sound environment of the work. Over a microphone, the sound waves transform into vibrations of a water surface and of light, reshaping their appearance.
The artist thus underscores as the key element of the entire installation the physical contact that triggers the process of the communication interface of public intimacy and is both the content and the form of the installation, since one continually affects and shapes the other.
Exhibition | Don't Dream Dreams | A Selection from the Art Collection Telekom and Two Commissioned Works
Location: MG+
In works of art, which are archives of elements, the most important thing is to arrange the multitude of components, rather than their elimination, for example, by replacing the set of elements with a generalization, with the rules according to which they are created, or which represent their unified, deeper point. From dealing with the history of art, through cosmologies, educational situations, urban planning, to collections of drawings, so-called psychological theaters and anthropomorphic sculptures - 43 works by 25 artists from Eastern and Southeastern Europe will be on display in the five halls of MG+. Two new commissioned works will also be presented as part of the exhibition.
