kud Obrat

Exhibition
24. 9. – 5. 10. 2008, Schute [Maknete], Hamburg
Artists: Polonca Lovšin, Tadej Pogačar, Marjetica Potrč, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Franc Purg & Sara Heitlinger
Curator: Urška Jurman

The exhibition presented RESEARCH BASED WORKS by four renowned Slovene artists and an artists tandem from Slovenia/UK/Australia. It focused on heterogeneity of working methods and presentation formats of researched material as well as on new understandings which are generated through the artistic researches. In order to grasp and understand the complex phenomena and issues with which the presented artists are dealing, they use artistic research as a transdisciplinary, diverse and open working method. While researching and exploring different cities and communities they establish new connections between existing information and disciplines and thus open a poetical space for creating new meanings and knowledge. Knowledge which they construct through their work is not just knowledge “about” the world. It is a specific way of “being” in the world – shaping the world through its understanding and developing understanding of it and ones position within it through a dialogue, (self)critical and (self)reflexive approach rather than a distant, quasi objective observation of the external world.

Polonca Lovšin presented a video work Why Slovene Houses Look the Way They Do (2007) in which she introduces to us the different economical, social and aesthetic standards which shape the architectural landscape in Slovenia. The Constructed City (2003-) is an ongoing urban research project by Tadej Pogacar in which he explores several cities as case studies of how different ideologies have produced different models of urban utopia. Marjetica Potrc will present her lecture about three of her recent research projects: in the Western Balkans (The Lost Highway Expedition, 2006), the Amazonian state of Acre in western Brazil (2006), and the city of New Orleans (2007) in which she was addressing dissolution of the 20th century modernism, ideas of sustainability and new forms of local democracies and citizenships. Outside My Door (2006) is a project by Marija Mojca Pungercar through which she has documented part of a local history of the Ljubljana suburb Grba from the time when the area was rapidly changing from a predominantly working-class neighborhood into a bourgeois luxury suburb. Franc Purg and Sara Heitlinger will present their work in process Privileged Tactics II. (2006-) in which they are researching the economy of a group of Coptics living in Cairo (known as Zaballeen – “people that collect rubbish”), which is based on processing the majority of solid-waste in this rapidly expanding city. The project also suggests a model based on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology for increasing personal responsibility for the environment in the developed world.

The exhibition was prepared during RAVE scholarship for curators which Urška Jurman received through the Galerie für Landschaftskunst (Hamburg) by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, IFA.

Production: Obrat, Ljubljana
Co-production: [Maknete], Hamburg
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and IFA.
Thanx to: Carsten Rabe, Ute Nissen, Stefan Doepner, Corinna Koch and Till Krause.