MG+MSUM

EXHIBITIONS 2020
01 January 2020 — 20 June 2021
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Moderna galerija, MG+

 

An Introspective: V.S.S.D. (Painter Do You Know Your Duty, 1985–1995) +– Alen Ožbolt (works 1995–2018)

6 February – 30 August 2020, Museum of Modern Art, MG+

The artistic production of the tandem Veš slikar svoj dolg – V.S.S.D. / Painter Do You Know Your Duty (Alen Ožbolt and Janez Jordan) constituted one of the important phenomena in contemporary art in Slovenia during the time the artists worked together (1985 to 1995). Introducing a new aesthetic in painting and sculpture in Slovenia, V.S.S.D. put forward a wholly new concept of artistic work. The impact V.S.S.D. had in the 1980s and 1990s on contemporary artistic expression in Slovenia was considerable, as is evidenced by the fact that one of its most characteristic and best known works – The Painting of a Painting, 1990/91 – is included in the permanent display of the Moderna galerija collection, 20th Century: Continuities and Ruptures.

 

Since the breakup of V.S.S.D., Alen Ožbolt has pursued a solo artistic career. To a certain extent, his art production is based on the postulates of V.S.S.D., but with a decisive caesura, evident in the early years of his solo work as a sharp and deliberate departure from V.S.S.D.’s recognizable poetics, although some formal and conceptual similarities with it and its “original forms and ideas” have become apparent over time in a mature realization.

 

Exhibition curator: Martina Vovk.

 

 

Censorship and Freedom of Expression. On the regression of freedoms in Europe

4 February 2020 — 14 February 2020, Museum of Modern Art, MG+

More and more often, artists are sentenced to prison for their work, their art is subject to censorship, while they are exposed to media aggression. Likewise, journalists experience ever-increasing pressure. The attacks they are exposed to are deliberately calculated actions that target a kind of self-censorship. In addition, critical art and independent journalism are able to find less and less funding. Journalists and cultural workers who raise uncomfortable questions can expect serious consequences and even see their careers endangered.

 

This exhibition would like to express unconditional support to the arts and culture, as well as to journalism, and set an example for freedom of opinion and human rights.

 

 

Zoran Mušič: Condemned to Hope

27 February – 5 July 2020, Museum of Modern Art, MG+

Twenty-four of Mušič’s Dachau drawings recently discovered in Italy are to be presented at an exhibition included in the Moderna galerija permanent exhibition of 20th century art. The drawings were first publicly presented in 2018 at the Revoltella Museum in Trieste. Also part of this display will be Mušič’s Dachau drawings from Slovenia and a selection of his works from the We Are Not the Last Ones… series, kept in public and private collections in Slovenia and Italy. Complementing the display will be passages from the testimonials of Nazi concentration camp survivors and liberators. The exhibition is dedicated to Erich Fischer.

Exhibition curator: Marko Jenko.

 

 

INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION | Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room 

15 October 2020 – 10 January 2021 

This is the first international exhibition of Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) that is dedicated solely to his travels across Yugoslavia and his late work. It showcases more than 120 of his works from the period between 1955 and 1957. The concept of the exhibition also relies on the “waiting room mentality,” as Heiner Müller described it in the documenta IX catalogue, seen as typical of the onetime socialist Central and Eastern Europe experience.

 

 

Tobias Putrih, Survey exhibition

From March 2021, Museum of Modern Art, MG+

In his numerous conceptual and materially ephemeral projects, Tobias Putrih explores the 20th century avant-gardes, especially their utopian and visionary concepts in architecture and design. He designs architecturally altered public places, such as cinema theaters, libraries, galleries, and universities, building temporary environments with paper, cardboard, wood, and light.

 

Tobias Putrih (1972) has shown his work at many major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt, ArtUnlimited in Basel, at the Fridericianum in Kassel, MoMA in New York, the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the Queensland Art Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. The exhibition will be Putrih’s first major mid-career survey exhibition in Slovenia after more than twenty years of intense international work. Putrih graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1997. He pursued postgraduate studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany (1997/98). In 2002 he received the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Award, and in 2009 the Prešeren Foundation Award. He lives in the United States, and teaches at the School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Exhibition curator: Igor Španjol.

 

 

Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

 

Forms of Freedom; Rojava Film Commune

5 March – 16 August 2020, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

The exhibition presents the Rojava Film Commune, a collective founded in 2015 and based in the autonomous region of Rojava in Western Kurdistan (in the north of Syria). This stateless democratic society is founded on basic principles, including women’s rights, ecology, and equality in all spheres of life. The Rojava political project challenges the patriarchal system, empowers ethnic and religious minorities, and has inspired the opening of local democratic spaces. All decisions on social issues, from infrastructure and energy to education and domestic violence, are discussed through public meetings where collective decision making takes place. These days, Rojava is facing brutal attacks and is in a critical moment struggling for its survival. Traveling exhibition curator: iLiana Fokianaki.

 

 

Karol Radziszewski: QAI/CEE

12 March – 20 September 2020, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

In the coming season, Moderna galerija and the Mladinsko Theater are together staging a program entitled Forms of Performing, which deals with the meaning of performance art and performing today. The purpose of this collaboration is to take the performance from the field of art into the broader public sphere to pursue various policies and identities, and the formal aspects of such performing. The project results from the interest the two institutions share in the field of the individual and collective body, apparent in Moderna galerija’s work for more than two decades, since the Body and the East exhibition in 1998. As part of this project, Moderna galerija is staging a performance by Mette Ingvartsen and an exhibition of Karol Radziszewski.

 

Jasmina Cibic: The Foundation of Endeavour

1 September 2020 – 8 February 2021, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

In her art, Jasmina Cibic focuses on the idea of entanglements between culture and ideology and culture and politics from the perspective of “soft power”. Working in film, sculpture, performance, and installation in space, she collaborates with architects, scientists and other experts in the fields of her research. The exhibition will present selected chapters from the artist’s poetic examination of what she terms “political gifts” from the history of European art and architecture in the time of renovation following political upheavals. Cibic has exhibited her work in numerous major international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale and Steirische Herbst, and has had solo shows at the Aarhus, Krefeld, CCA in Glasgow and elsewhere. Cibic lives and works in London.

 

Exhibition curator: Igor Španjol.

 

 

Autograph, Mystery, Rebellion: Photography by Božidar Dolenc

24 February – 6 June 2021, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

This first large-scale and comprehensive posthumous exhibition of the work of Božidar Dolenc, one of the most prominent and acclaimed photographers of the second half of the 20th century in Slovenia, is conceived around his legacy, acquired in 2016. A free, nonconformist spirit, Dolenc was drawn to street scenes, formulating a recognizable poetic of almost painful veracity and semantic bitterness, as well as to the visual aesthetic of the alternative culture events of the late 1970s, whose main photographic witness he is now considered to be. The oeuvre he produced is so complex, abundant and rich that we have decided to give equal attention to his well-known series which he himself chose for exhibitions and the large body of photographs portraying the alternative culture of the 1980s. The exhibition comprises two units, two independent parts, differing in both content and the mode of presentation.

 

Conceived by exhibition curators, Lara Štrumej and Rok Vevar.

 

 

REALIZE! RESIST! REACT! Performance and Politics in the 1990s in the Post-Yugoslav Context

Curated by Bojana Piškur with Siniša Ilić, Jasna Jakšić, Vida Knežević, Nita Luci & Linda Gusia, Asja Mandić, Biljana Tanurovska & Ivana Vaseva, Rok Vevar & Jasmina Založnik.

 

24 June – 3 October 2021, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM)

 

In the post-Yugoslav context of the 1990s, political performance was, in most cases, a direct consequence of the wars in Yugoslavia and the radical political, social, economic, and cultural changes that affected every aspect of society in the previously common state.

 

Nonetheless, political performance never merely “bore witness” to events; it was also direct political action against the regime (e.g. the Milošević regime in Serbia). This type of artistic engagement is also called “art under extreme political circumstances.” In certain countries, on the other hand, political performance stepped back from the daily political reality (particularly in Slovenia and North Macedonia) and focused on other issues, such as the new cultural policies in the 1990s, the new “cultural identities” and similar. In such cases we tend to speak of “performing the political” rather than political performance.

 

Our examination of political performance is based on the following questions: What can political performance tell us about the events during the wars in Yugoslavia and about the time that followed, and how can it do that? What were the connections between performances and the political and ideological structures in which they originated? Can these very specific performances be correlated to performance works in other parts of the world? Can we connect the events of the 1990s with the current political situation?

 

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis

21 October 2021 – 12 February 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

 

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 by artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. They work in the fields of film and video, as curators and writers, and develop public platforms for examining aspects of contemporary societies. The group is named after otoliths, the calcium carbonate micro crystals located within the middle ear that maintains the human capacities of verticality and balance under the terrestrial condition of planetary gravity. The exhibition is named after Octavia Butlers’ Xenogenesis Trilogy, which investigated questions of human extinction, racial distinction, planetary transformation, enforced mutation, generative alienation and altered kinship. It is a selection of works from the exhibition staged last year at the Van Abbemuseum, Moderna galerija’s partner institution in the international confederation of museums L’Internationale.

 

 

Draught Series

Živa Božičnik Rebec, Topical Applications 2 

19 December 2019 – 15 March 2020

Jošt Franko, Blut und Boden

4 June – 20 September 2020

Jaka Babnik, Časovna izravnava 

20 October 2020 – 28 March 2021

 

 

Traveling exhibitions

Southern constellations: the poetics of the non-aligned

15 May – 9 November 2020

Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea

This exhibition, which received the International Council of Museums (ICOM), Slovenia 2019 Award, is traveling to South Korea. Its focus is on the Non-Aligned Movement, with special emphasis on the movement’s ideas, ideals, and principles concerning cultural policies, considered also in terms of the present-day context. Presented are the ways “Southern constellations” conceived politics based on the lives of nations and societies forcibly relegated to the margins of the global economic, political, and cultural system.

Exhibition curator: Bojana Piškur.

 

Heroes before and after the collapse of a society; Contemporary art and the legacy of Yugoslavia

November 2020 – January 2021

MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome

A certain segment of contemporary art in the territories of the former Yugoslavia taps into the potential of the local emancipatory traditions in its search for answers to the burning issues of our time. These traditions will, in the show’s central narrative, be indirectly based on the imagery of heroism as it changed over time, from World War II, when the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia formed, to our time, when the newly founded states in this territory are increasingly losing their sovereignty in the face of global transnational connections.

Exhibition curator: Zdenka Badovinac.

 
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