Architecture ≠ Art: Alen Ožbolt & Elke Krasny

Thursday, 19 November 2015, at 6 pm, Museum of Architecture and Design, Grad Fužine, Pot na Fužine 2, Ljubljana

Together with the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory we cordially invite you to attend an evening featuring two lectures by Alen Ožbolt and Elke Krasny as part of of the Architecture ≠ Art programme. The lectures will be held in Slovene and English.
Both lectures will deal with the way that architecture intersects with visual arts and vice versa, with what is lost and what is gained in this translation, and how encountering art and architecture influences the very conception and redefinition of artistic and architectural practice.
 
Alen Ožbolt: Spaces and Relations between Architecture and Sculpture
How can we examine, without any qualms, the various relations between architecture and art at the time of a heightened crisis? The quandary is not in the least moralistic, it is quite fundamental, ethical. And, of course, also theoretical, it is a quandary of theory.  
While, in the 20th century and beyond, sculpture traversed a long path (from body to object, from the vertical to the horizontal, from volume to space, from mass to dematerialisation, etc.), became (minimalism) increasingly more similar to (modernist) architecture and could even be entered, architecture – due to exceptional 3D tools and the technological possibilities of new materials – increasingly more often quoted, adopted, and parasitized “small” sculptural forms of historical avant-gardes, enlarging them into houses, museums and palaces.
If, as a hybrid, intertwined and “impure”, sculpture and architecture are increasingly more difficult to distinguish by form, size and spatial scope, does that mean that we can distinguish them merely by their purpose? And if this in-between space – the space of both, a hybrid space – actually exists, is it really open and also potential?

Elke Krasny: Curating Architecture/Curating Art: Contemporary Encounters
Even though we now have a body of work on the historiography of contemporary art curation and an emerging body of work on the historiography of architecture curation, there have rarely been attempts to work out a joined historiographical project. This lecture identifies key moments of exhibition-making and project-based curating with respect to the intersection of art and architecture. On this basis I will tease out differences, contradictions, as well as possible alliances for future architecture-art-encounters.

Alen Ožbolt (Ljubljana) is a visual artist and professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Between 1984−1995 he performed within the artistic group Do You Painter Know Your Dues (VSSD); since 1996 he has been working independently. In several works he has explicitly dealt with the relation between the art work and space; he has also been acting in the public space – sometimes also illegally and sometimes even with the intention to educate people about the possibilities of sculpture in public space (Ensembles – prostorski rebusi / Kamen na nebu, 2008).

Elke Krasny (Vienna) is a curator, cultural theorist, and writer. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. In 2014 she was City of Vienna Visiting Professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In 2013 she was Visiting Professor of Architecture and Urban Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. Her theoretical and curatorial work is firmly rooted in socially-engaged art, architecture and spatial practices, urban epistemology, post-colonial theory, and feminist historiography. She curated Hands-on Urbanism 1850-2012. The Right to Green (Architekturzentrum, Vienna, 2012), which was presented also at the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Organized by: the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory; Museum of Architecture and Design
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation