Draught | Viktor Bernik: Window / a Hole in the Museum
18 November 2021 – 2 January 2022
Viktor Bernik’s installations intertwine scenes in actual spaces or objects and borrowed media images, while his strategy of montage and appropriation underlines the specific status of the mediated images and experiences he creates. In the present work, Bernik’s approach is similar to two of his previous interventions: the 2009 one in Moderna galerija’s former project space Mala galerija, and the Radio 1 (A Work for the Museum Collection) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) in 2015. Both were attempts at undermining the dominant perception of the medium of exhibition and drawing attention to the boundary between the exhibition space and the exterior. The interventions were based on adopting and reaffirming approaches that make explicit the idea of a neutral empty exhibition space, including it in the effect of the intervention in space.
Several contemporary artists focus on the topic of the window; thus in the works of Pawel Althamer or Yuri Leiderman windows form patterns and messages on the exteriors of buildings. Bernik uses the motif of the window to question the neutrality of abstract space, deliberately abolishing the dualism between a work and an exhibition. His work is not an autonomous entity that needs to have a suitable setting arranged for it; it happens precisely in the tense and dynamic relationship between artefacts, a space, a spectator, and an institutional setting. Already the Mala galerija’s large windows – the characteristic that sets the space most apart from some neutral “white cube” – played a special role as a link between the interior and the exterior. On the other hand, windows can reveal surprising messages or information, and often in contrast with the gray urban environment. This is especially true of minor details in windows, such as various objects on windowsills, or illuminated windows at night.
By incorporating a window into the +MSUM façade, Bernik set up a reflexive relationship with the exhibition space as a crucial relational category, abolishing the symbolic boundary separating the interior from the plaza in front of the museum and reopening the questions of discourse and emptiness, the medium of exhibition, and the materiality of art. Moreover, the exhibition broaches the issue of the relation between an unmediated, direct experience of artworks in a physical gallery space and the technologically mediated experience of art via the media, here enabled by employing windows as some sort of screens.
Viktor Bernik (b. 1971) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana with a degree in painting under Metka Krašovec and Bojan Gorenec, and went on to complete his postgraduate studies under Gorenec. He also continued with further postgraduate studies in the United States.
Exhibition curator: Igor Španjol.
