Foto: Marcandrea

With the project VN20 Via Negativa performs a gesture of re-inscribing memory in its own record of the past. The artists who have co-created the VN platform's past will install and archive themselves anew each month in this space of institutionalised memory. The cycle of performances and installations will end on 21 November 2024 with the launch of the online archive VN20 - a collection of Via Negativa documents from the period 2002-2021.

Via Negativa thus juxtaposes two strategies of memory. The first is the memory of the creators of the past - a subjective projection of the past that manipulates its own memory through strategies of repetition, recreation, reenactment, reflection, transcription, inscription, rewriting, forgetting, compiling, distancing, ironising, mythicising, or demystifying all that has been and all that has not been.

The second is the memory of archival documents - petrified traces of what once was alive, fragments of what the camera has or has not seen, what the photographer has or has not captured, what the critic has or has not written. The archive as a catalogue of the imprints of an event or an era is an arbitrary formalisation of the past that completely misses the point of what VN really is: a live performance gesture.

We, the makers of this past, claim today and in advance, still in sound mind and in spite of our broken bodies, that this has nothing to do with what really happened and what we really did. VN20 is not the truth, it is a construct, it is a montage, it is a fabrication, it is a photoshop, it is a fake.

09.11.2023
Grega Zorc: All that you came for

04.01.2024
Anita Wach: No No No, No No No

28.01.2024
Marko Mandić: MandićBaptism

22.02.2024
Kristina Aleksova: For all pigs in my heart

21.03.2024
Barbara Kukovec: Now

25.04.2024
Nataša Živković: Artikel

23.05.2024
Katarina Stegnar: No one should

20.06.2024
Špela Trošt: The second view

22.08.2024
Loup Abramovici: Everything we have dumped

26.09.2024
Tomaž Grom: Fearsome ass

24.10.2024
Olja Grubić: Hope

21.11.2024
Bojan Jablanovec: Skeptomai - darkroom of artistic scepticism

VN20 curator Bojan Jablanovec

Space design Matej Stupica

Video mapping and synchronization Stella Ivšek

Sound design Eduardo Raon

Producers Špela Trošt (VN), Tomaž Kučer (MG+MSUM)

Coordinator Adela Železnik

Production Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; represented by Acting Director Martina Vovk

Coproduction Via Negativa

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana