Architecture ≠ Art: Jasmina Cibic & Mateja Kurir

We are finishing this year architecture ≠ art lecture serial with two lectures by an artist Jasmina Cibic and phisolopher Mateja Kurir, on Thursday, 3 December 2015, at 6 pm, at +MSUM, Maistrova 3, Ljubljana.

Jasmina Cibic Renovate and Relaunch
I will focus on my latest project Spielraum, which draws reference to the writing of one of Europe’s first political satirical writers, Karl Kraus. In his essay Spielraum (1912), Kraus fervently argues against the use of decoration in both language and architecture. In my project I read Kraus in relation to the widespread phenomena of the programmatic application of decoration across practically every (trans)national political structure within language and the built environment. I will discuss the research behind my project, including the plans and designs for the city of Belgrade ahead of the occasion of the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Deriving from this experience I will reflect on the working methodologies of contemporary artists, addressing sites of ideological charge and the possibilities of constructive critique evolving from such projects.

Mateja Kurir: Constructing a Break – The Paradigms of Modernist Architecture
Contemporary architecture is marked by a radical cut that modernist architecture made in space in the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, the changed postulates of this architecture were conceived in relation to the break with tradition and the construction of new paradigms that can be encapsulated in three conceptual cores: technology, abstraction, transparency. In a short description of these paradigms, the lecture will focus on tracing the definitions of the architects of that time and the search for the solution of the last term of the equation: modernist architecture = technology + something more. How was this something more, this imaginary element, which can also be ascribed to the field of art, understood by the architects and theoreticians at the time?

Jasmina Cibic studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, Italy, before receiving an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, 2006. She represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial. Jasmina Cibic’s work explores histories of ideological formations, which she addresses with site and context specific installations, performance and film. Her recent solo projects and exhibitions include Building Desire, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad; Tear Down and Rebuild, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Spielraum, MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; The Nation Loves It, Ludwig Museum, Budapest.

Mateja Kurir is a philosopher and architectural theoretician. She obtained her PhD "Architecture in philosophy; the reflection of architecture as a contemporary art form in the hermeneutic and structuralist philosophy of the twentieth century" at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (2014). Her primary field of interest is the theoretical positioning of architectural modernism. She was the initiator and co-author of the broadcast Arhitektura govori (Architecture Speaks) at Radio Študent, she also publishes articles on architecture in different magazines. She is a member of the collective KUD C3. In 2015 she was a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Architecture of the University of Leuven (Belgium).

Organised by: the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory with the support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation