EXTERNAL ACTIVITIES ARCHIVE

15 June - 5 September 2010

Press conference: Monday, 14 June, 11 a.m., Moderna galerija, auditorium
Opening: Tuesday, 15 June, 8 p.m.

This 6th U3 Slovenian art triennial focuses on how artists from across the generations reflect today on reality and the depiction of activities and relationships in the world around them. It foregrounds artistic proposals about history, the environment and the social as much as intimate relations with community, family and friends. It is not centred on the inner life of the artist but on his/her relationship with external people and institutions. To choose for the external is a choice to reflect the current strengths of the Slovenian art scene as well as a recognition of longer artistic tendencies in this country towards overidentification and strategies to seek connections with other fields and subjects outside of the traditions of l'art pour l'art.

Realism: a brief history
The question of realism has produced many of the sharpest debates between radicals and conservatives in visual art over the past 100 years. As the first modern artist, Gustav Courbet's realism shocked a bourgeois art public looking for beauty and drama in painting. Later, the battle between the painters of everyday life and the ambitions of the avant-garde for new visions of a new world defined modernism. Realism at this time was understood as a safer or less radical choice for artists, yet it always retained its value as a more direct form of communication with a wide public than abstraction or concept art.

Indeed, the doctrines of socialist realism as developed in the Soviet Union were intended to produce an art that was comprehensible to and inspirational for the proletariat, as well as a means to control undesirable questioning and experimentation. Throughout the period of modernism, both realism and the avant-garde battled against each other across Europe and beyond, neither gaining a final victory. The growth of new media, first through art photography and later video and digital imaging added new levels to the realism debate with the capacity to directly capture an image of the real and reproduce it in a form of art. Photography offered an even more direct relationship to surrounding reality than ever possible before, while collage and later digital editing created the means to fictionalise these apparently direct, indexical media.

The Slovenian context
Since 1989, realism and 'the real' itself has made something of a comeback in general, and not only in terms of image making and depiction of reality. Artists in the last twenty years have been intervening directly in surrounding conditions, or bringing those conditions and relations between people into the gallery or museum unaltered except through naming it art. This exchange with the real is particularly present in the Slovenian context, where it has an even longer history going back to the beginnings of NSK. Here, from techniques of over-identification to the construction of self-organised institutions that hover somewhere between fact and fiction, artistic projects write new histories or campaign for change in social conditions.

There is also an access to the corridors of media and political power for artists in Slovenia that is quite exceptional in Europe and sometimes allows for direct intervention in the system. While some works here are determinedly political, other actions are carried out with a playful irreverence that charms as much as it raises political awareness. It seems there is a particular sense of absurdism here that provokes the status of things and challenges the rhetoric of state and institutional identities. This humour extends to making objects as much as to depicting people and social institutions. In this environment, social interventions can be direct without losing critical distance, appearances can be taken seriously and realism allows itself to both comment on and document reality.

This exhibition will have at its core a small, eclectic historical selection through the realism to be found in the collection of the Moderna galerija, supplemented with the films of Tomislav Gotovac and Želimir Žilnik, crucial Yugoslavian filmmakers in the genre. Having set up the existence of histories of realism in the Slovenian context, the exhibition will look at contemporary artworks that reflect on subjects as diverse as the history of flight, party politics, domestic interiors and art education in the playful ways common across the exhibition.

It is interesting that while these topics are in themselves fascinating for the artists, they are also often the excuse of coming together, and acting together in ways that perhaps reflect the loss of a collective sense in the post-communist period, not only here but across former West and East Europe. Thus this exhibition, An Idea for Living, becomes a specific national investigation into a broader condition. Can artists, by thinking about and directly showing us the world around, create conditions in which concepts of living together and working in common can be re-energised for the future?

Participants
Nika Autor, Jože Barši, Berko, BridA (Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango, Jurij Pavlica), Matija Brumen, Vesna Bukovec, Jasmina Cibic, Vuk Ćosić, Delavsko-punkerska univerza, Leon Dolinšek, Domestic Research Society, Vadim Fiškin, Samo Gosarič, Tomislav Gotovac, Dejan Habicht, Irwin, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Marco Juratovec, Jaša, Bogoslav Kalaš, Tanja Lažetić, Vladimir Leben, Polonca Lovšin, Anja Medved, Borut Peterlin, Tadej Pogačar and P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, Marko Pogačnik, Uroš Potočnik, Marjetica Potrč, radioCona (Irena Pivka, Brane Zorman), Sašo Sedlaček, SMALL BUT DANGERS (Mateja Rojc, Simon Hudolin-Salči), Slavko Smolej, Bálint Szombathy, Nika Špan, Miha Štrukelj, Matjaž Wenzel, Dunja Zupančič::Miha Turšič::Dragan Živadinov, Želimir Žilnik.

Website Moderna Galerija Ljubljana

12th October - 16th October 2009

How can a biennale want to be a biennale in a state that is not a state? In a place that is so overwhelmed with visual realities that the exhibition would almost vanish into the surrounding disciplinary excess? What if this idea can be understood as an art project itself, leaving urgent room to speculate on its own conception, validity and continuity?

These are just a few of the questions of the 3^rd RIWAQ Biennale, which forms itself first and foremost around a conceptual art project introduced by the artist Khalil Rabah. It follows the trajectory of (re)producing institutions that lie between fact and fiction, such as the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind and the United States of Palestine Times. With a touch of irony, Rabah simulates the processes of national institutionalization and the assembly of national narratives though the collective and communicative structures that drive them. In this particular context, agency, sociality, performativity, politics and animation all develop new and multiple meanings. Rabahs’ imagined institutions transgress borders, smuggling themselves into places where they can create havoc because of their ambivalent relation to the models that inspire them.

In this way, the 3^rd Riwaq Biennale took place for the first time during the Venice Biennale and functioned as a biennale in a biennale. A deliberate confluence of geographies, contexts and authorities, it has the possibility soon to metamorphose in Palestine into a kind of ‘living art’, that is an art that does not necessarily add to the environment but calls upon it as it is, in this case in a geography that we can never take for granted.

The transformation that revels itself in October is already underway. The name, starting point and aim of the 3^rd RIWAQ Biennale were taken from the Riwaq NGO based in Ramallah, an organization that works on the protection and rehabilitation of Palestinian cultural heritage. Advancing the aims of the Riwaq NGO has been the starting point of all editions of the biennial, and in this sense the biennale can be understood as continuous and ongoing, working alongside Riwaq and being present as element within their larger plans. The framework of the 3^rd Riwaq Biennale adopts Riwaq’s goal of rehabilitating 50 villages, while not being present in each of them. Instead, it chooses a number of venues and platforms in the historic center of Birzeit as well as in other villages and their surrounding landscapes. Here, temporary interventions, periods of gathering and constructions of possible scenarios for the future will be presented.

This represents a refusal of the original biennale concept appropriate to Khalil’s work and to the environmental conditions. Thus this 3rd RIWAQ Biennale will not feature any large-scale, central exhibitions, but consist of a series of journeys between fragmented and disparate locations, reflecting on and moving through the fractured territory of Palestine. As a journey between locations, the 3^rd Riwaq Biennale is conceived as a series of trails, curated multidisciplinary conversations and interactions between the people who live in these areas and invited or self-selected international colleagues. The days of the Biennale present a unique opportunity to experience and come to a level of awareness of what is possible.  They will also coincide with a variety of workshops, gatherings and cultural events organized by others that will take place in the same week, including the Jerusalem Show curated by Jack Persekian and Nina Möntmann that opens on 11^th October. 

The result will be that during the period, a shifting interplay and agglomeration of activities in which cultural producers ranging through artists, architects, historians, theorists, curators, critics, journalists and all other audiences are brought together to participate in producing and re-producing the meaning of collective biennale culture as process, with an equal emphasis on the transdisciplinary, the historical and the living.

More info on the website of the 3rd RIWAQ Biennial.

12th September - 8th November 2009

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

The 11th International İstanbul Biennial takes its title from the song 'Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?', translated into English as 'What Keeps Mankind Alive?'. The song closes the second act of the play The Threepenny Opera, written exactly 80 years ago by Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. A phenomenal success at the time of its premiere in 1928, the play was written as an adaptation of John Gay's 18th century The Beggar's Opera, and it set out to revolutionise theatre as both an artistic form and a tool for social and political change.

The transformation of the 'theatre apparatus' by The Threepenny Opera, based on Brecht's assertion that 'a criminal is a bourgeois and a bourgeois is a criminal,' was achieved through an alteration of the existing notions of theatre 'genres' and the play's relationship with the audience.

More on the website of the Istanbul Biennial