Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM
Curator: Igor Španjol
Opening: Thursday, 22 December, 8 pm
The exhibition covers the fifty-year long history of Dragan’s artistic production in the new media as it evolved in the Slovene cultural space: original, archival, and television works.
This exhibition was conceived with the aim of presenting a survey of Srečo Dragan’s oeuvre. The exhibition covers the history of Dragan’s artistic production in the new media as it evolved in the Slovene cultural space. The works from the early 1960s and 1970s, when the artist worked alone or in tandem with Nuša Dragan, constituted an important contribution to the neo-avant-garde art of the time and later, to the so-called “new artistic practice”. By organizing exhibitions and authoring programs and texts they tried to contextualize their work and videos in the broader Yugoslav and international space. The artist’s initial involvement in video is linked to his practice of realizing art in accordance with the concepts of the OHO group. Particularly important in this stage are the pioneering works of interactive and media art. For video art, television programs were important as a medium of production, presentation, and reflection. In the 1980s and 1990s, Srečo Dragan continued to explore the possibilities offered by the new media, particularly video, together with Internet and cybernetic technologies. The viewers’ experience of an exhibition was based on a technology-supported expanded view, on new ways of guiding the gaze, seducing it, obscuring it, revealing and losing it. As a demonstration of smart machines in their explicitly interactive artistic use of the time, an exhibition also put on view a specific array of visual endeavors. At the Time is out of Joint exhibition at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana in 2000, viewers could follow the meta-language of a robot leading them through the location points or frame their own concepts of reading the exhibited documents.
In his recent work Dragan focuses on realizations of interactive net installations and computer 3D animations.
To better understand the variety and range of his present artistic output, we must return to the fundamental circumstances of his forming and the early years of his work, because only with insight into this crucial background can we see the continuity in the development of his art to this day. The exhibition puts on view the early works produced together with Nuša Dragan, the later interactive projects, and Dragan’s recent solo works: conceptual projects, happenings, videos, films, interactive installations, performances, and actions in exhibition and public urban spaces. Also an artistic reconceptualization of the archive of unstable media will be displayed as a concept installation. Videos documenting the artist’s participation in experimental actions and in public television programs as a strategy to introduce hermetic artistic concepts in the public space of popular culture and record the viewers’ reactions will be shown. The exhibition display is based on a network of connections between and intersections of all these lines (original works, the archive, television appearances) in the organism of the exhibition space.
From the early OHO happenings in urban spaces to his latest technology-based gallery projects, Srečo Dragan has consistently addressed passersby, mostly by forming imaginary, but ever-present, repeated communication, perceived and remembered by the participants as an experience, without necessarily it being physically realized in an artifact. By virtue of their directness, Dragan’s projects manage to avoid the hermetism of conceptual statements – also for random viewers – thus giving rise to some kind of democratic creative field shared by the artist–initiator, active participants, and incidental viewers.
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Biography
Born in Spodnji Hrastnik in 1944. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1968, and completed his postgraduate studies there in 1970. In 1973, he studied new media in London, and in 1977, in Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Krakow. He won a French government research fellowship for video art and spent 1984 and 1985 at the Institut national de l'audiovisuel - des ateliers de la recherche de l'INA, SFP TV Paris, and at the Department of Film and Video of the University of Paris (The Sorbonne). Between 1967 and 1988 he worked in tandem with Ana Nuša Dragan; together in 1969 they made the first ever video in Yugoslavia, The White Milk of White Breasts. In 1968 and 1969 they were members of the OHO movement, which is associated with reism, arte povera, conceptualism, contextualization of language, installations, and the use of new technologies, film, and video.
From 1987 until his retirement in 2014 he taught aesthetics and the technology of video art at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. He maintains a constant presence at Slovene and international exhibitions and festivals of intermedia art as a participant, mentor, and supporter.
His body of work has been acclaimed and often awarded. Among others, in 2007 he received the Rihard Jakopič Award, the highest national accolade for fine and visual arts, for his pioneering work and accomplishments in new electronic media in fine art.
Support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, RTV Slovenia, Inštitut Jožef Stefan, University of Ljubljana: Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering :: Laboratory of Robotics, Academy of Fine Arts and Design
Photo:
Srečo Dragan, Paradigm of Image Sonification II, 2015. Speculum Artium, Delavski dom Trbovlje. Photo: Franc Solina / archives of Worker's Home Trbovlje
Nuša & Srečo Dragan, Monument of Sacrifice and Orgy: the Fall of Humankind on the Odessa Steps, 1985. Photo: Matija Pavlovec, Dejan Habicht, archives of the Moderna galerija
Srečo Dragan, Time is Out of Joint, 2000. Photo: Matija Pavlovec, archives of the Moderna galerija
Srečo Dragan, Sonifikacija podobe II, 2015. Speculum Artium, Delavski dom Trbovlje. Photo: Franc Solina / archives of Worker's Home Trbovlje
