Art for Collective Use

21–22 April 2022, City Museum of Ljubljana

The second symposium continues with in-depth investigations into practices of exhibiting art, architecture, and design in Slovenia. A number of venerable anniversaries of prominent Slovenian art institutions in 2019, in particular the 110th anniversary of the Jakopič Pavilion – the first venue to be purpose-built for exhibiting art – were just one of the motives for organising the first Exhibiting in Slovenia symposium. The excellent response and the diversity of topics relating to exhibition practices attested to the interest of both the professional and lay public in this subject and associated issues. For this reason, we decided to organise periodic meetings.

At the symposium, selected exhibitions, institutions, and other phenomena involved in exhibiting art are again discussed chronologically and from various perspectives. We begin with an important topic – the oldest permanent exhibitions of the Provincial Museum of Carniola – and continue with mid-19th-century art societies, which were the first to advocate and provide for more regular exhibitions of the art of their day. Introductory papers also discuss one-off and short-term exhibitions that took place before World War II; they are followed by reflections on the more stable thematic, programmatic, and political orientations of institutions and their role in directing and shaping the visual arts domain in Slovenia. As in the first symposium, the topics converge in research on the accelerated institutionalisation of art, architecture, and design after World War II as well as on how and why this trend soon resulted in a wave of recurrent events, primarily biennials. We conclude with analyses of selected exhibitions, significant curatorial practices of recent decades, and new exhibition formats. In the last section we look at practices in the exhibiting of performative work, as we move from standard exhibition venues to virtual platforms and the public space. We are particularly pleased to be again joined in our reflections by insightful foreign researchers, who bring valuable external perspectives on Slovenian exhibition activity.

We intend to maintain the same approach we outlined with the first symposium: an in-depth reflection on exhibition activity in Slovenia that involves critical introspection and seeks to elucidate effects of exhibition practices that are harder to trace. Our explorations into how and why a certain exhibition practice occurs and becomes established, its relationship with the exhibited objects and art in general, and its interaction with political and other non-art discourses and agendas are guided by the desire to better understand both the medium of the exhibition and the internal logic and workings of the Slovenian art system.

Thursday, 21 April 2022

10:00 Welcome by Blaž Peršin, director of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML) and Beti Žerovc, representative of the organising committee, head of the research project Exhibiting of Art and Architecture between Artistic and Ideological Concepts. Case Study of Slovenia, 1947–1979 (J6-3137)

Exhibiting in Slovenia before World War I
Chair: Miha Valant

10:15 Mateja Kos: The Oldest Permanent Exhibitions of the Provincial Museum of Carniola in Ljubljana (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10:35 Irena Kraševac: The First Exhibitions of the Slovenian Artists' Society (Slovensko umetniško društvo) in Ljubljana and Zagreb in 1900/1901  (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10:55 Tomaž Brejc: Gallery Sculptures  (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11:30 Renata Komić Marn: In the Display Window. Grohar and Exhibiting 1900–1910
11:50 Alessandro Quinzi: 110th Anniversary of “Intimate Exhibition” in Gorizia  (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12:10 Panel discussion

Exhibiting in Interwar Period
Chair: Asta Vrečko

13:10 Hana Čeferin, Jera Krečič, Neža Lukančič, Lara Mejač, Ana Obid: Jakopič Pavilion and International Exhibition Activity between 1919 and 1945 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
13:30 Vesna Krmelj: The Role of the Ljubljana Grand Fair in the Development of Exhibition Activity in Slovenia between the Two World Wars
13:50 Tamara Bjažić Klarin: International Appearances of Men and Women Architects of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1920s and 1930s
14:10 Panel discussion

Exhibiting in the Second Yugoslavia I
Chair: Beti Žerovc
16:00 Gregor Dražil: Different Models of Printmaking. Alternatives to the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in Yugoslavia (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16:20 Wiktor Komorowski: “Graphic Art is Unruly”. Polish Participation at the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts 1955–1989 (video of the lecture)
16:40 Giovanni Rubino: Serigraphy at the Time of its Democratic Multiplication. Examples of Italian Art in Yugoslavia around 1968 (video of the lecture )
17:00 Sanja Horvatinčić: Monuments on Display. International Exhibitions of Yugoslav Memorial Production (video of the lecture)
17:20 Panel discussion

Friday, 22 April 2022

Exhibiting in the Second Yugoslavia II
Chair: Martina Malešič

9:00 Asta Vrečko: Exhibiting American Art in Slovenia in the 1960s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
9:20 Nadja Zgonik: Adria Art Gallery (1967–69), a Sales Gallery of Yugoslav Fine Arts in New York, or How Socialist Art Set Out to Conquer the Western Market (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
9:40 Cvetka Požar, Maja Vardjan: Exhibitions of Model Apartments as a Starting Point for a New Living Culture (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10:00 Katarina Hergold Germ: Peace 75–30 UN. Out of the Box Exhibition (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10:20 Panel discussion

Expansion of Art Institutions around Slovenia after World War II
Chair: Katarina Mohar
11:20 Miha Colner: Exhibition Activity at Lamut’s Art Salon (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11:40 Meta Kordiš: Rotovž Exhibition Salon, Maribor (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12:00 Teja Merhar: The Archives Department, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12:20 Panel discussion

Exhibiting of Contemporary Art I  
Chair: Vladimir Vidmar
14:00 Christophe Barbeau: The Curator’s Rooms (video of the lecture)
14:20 Emi Finkelstein: Revising the Museum. Exhibiting Moderna galerija’s Arteast 2000+ in Berlin (video of the lecture)
14:40 Ivana Meštrov, Ksenija Orelj: Exhibiting Museum Collections in Times of Hyper-Production – Merging Traditional and Experimental Approaches (video of the lecture)
15:00 Panel discussion

Exhibiting of Contemporary Art II  
Chair: Urška Jurman
16:00 Neja Kaiser: Exhibiting Performance in Slovenia. The Case of Body and the East Exhibition (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16:20 Kaja Kraner: The Online Exhibition as Medium. Between Democratisation and a Reflection on the Logic of the Digital (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16:40 Petja Grafenauer, Nataša Ivanović: Works of Art in the Context of the Protest Movement 2020/2021 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17:00 Panel discussion

The symposium was held in Slovene and English.

The symposium was being organized in cooperation with: the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, and the Božidar Jakac Art Museum as well as the France Stele Institute of Art History (the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, ZRC SAZU), and the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana as part of the research project Exhibiting of Art and Architecture between Artistic and Ideological Concepts. Case Study of Slovenia, 1947–1979 (J6-3137).

The symposium was financially supported by Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) and the ERSTE Foundation.

During this year’s seminar we will discuss the development of visual arts, the exhibition practices, and art institutions in Slovenia – as well as in the Central European and wider international context – in the years from 1969 to 1996. In the last decades of the 20th century, the field of visual arts was, both globally and in Slovenia, dynamic, experiencing development and ongoing changes on all levels (increased institutionalization, biennialization, market growth, new artistic and exhibition practices, etc.). In Slovenia, art events were also influenced by politics: Tito’s death and the turbulent 1980s were followed by the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early part of the 1990s. Rather than a stable federation, we experienced a multiplication of independent countries fighting among themselves, and the socialist system was replaced by a political party system and capitalism. 

We will explore how visuals arts and exhibitions developed in this politically charged environment. We will discuss the relations between exhibitions and art, and determine what kind of exhibitions were successful in Slovenia and what their impact was. We will pay special attention to who organized and financed exhibitions (and why), and how artistic status was structured through them. We will further pay attention to how the feminization of the art field occurred and new art schools were opened during this period, etc. The common thread of the lecture will be the discussion of selected exhibitions, making a chronological arc from the practices of the OHO group in the late 1960s to the international biennial exhibition Manifesta in Ljubljana in 2000. The internal logic and principles of the operations of the Slovenian art system will be revealed through the interpretation of these connected but diverse phenomena.

Organized by: Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and Igor Zabel Association

IVANA BAGO
Yugoslav Fanonism in Three (Exhibitionary) Acts: 1950/1972/1989
24 May 2021, online lecture
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Video recording

ANA EREŠ
Exhibiting Yugoslav Art at the Venice Biennale (1948–1990): A History of Shifting Representations
26 April 2021, online lecture
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Video recording

BRANISLAV DIMITRIJEVIĆ
“New Art Practices” in Exhibitions and Institutional Policies in Serbia, 1967–1983
30 March 2021, online lecture
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Video recording

CONVERSATION WITH MILENKO MATANOVIĆ
22 May 2017, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana (lecture room 343)

Milenko Matanović who in the 1960s was a member of the OHO Group, made some of Slovenian iconic works: Triglav (1968), Wheat and Rope (1969), Project, 30 April 1970, The Constellation of the Candles in the Field Corresponds to the Constellation of the Stars in the Sky (1970). At the beginning of the 1970s, he moved to the US, where he founded and until recently ran the Pomegranate Center, which primarily helps urban neighbourhoods and other communities plan and build common gathering areas.
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Video recording

In this series of public lectures we will discuss the development of art, its exhibiting and institutions in Slovenia, in the Central European and broader international framework, between 1919 and 1969. The troubled period after World War I was characterized by the shock upon the disintegration of the so-called double monarchy, which ended several centuries of our inclusion in the Austrian cultural space, its standards and infrastructure. Suddenly, Slovenians were divided among several countries, with the majority becoming citizens of the newly established and culturally diverse Yugoslav monarchy, which for a long time remained without a common and effective cultural policy. After a few decades and the upheaval of World War II, the centralistic monarchy was replaced by the federal, socialist system with a new perspective on culture and art and their role in society. 

We will try to understand how, in such a politically charged environment, art and exhibiting emerge and establish themselves. We will consider the relation between an exhibition and art and examine which exhibitions in Slovenia are successful and what most often goes wrong in exhibiting. We will pay attention to who organizes and/or funds the exhibitions and why. The common thread of the lectures will be a discussion of select examples of exhibiting. How did Avgust Černigoj, Neodvisni, and the OHO Group exhibit and why did they do it the way they did? We will ask how and why the period after WWII saw an accelerated institutionalization of contemporary art and the expansion of cyclical exhibitions. While interpreting concrete examples, we will discover the inner logic and the principles of the way that the Slovenian art system operates.

Organized by: Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and Igor Zabel Association

PETAR PRELOG
New Art Meets the Audience: Exhibitions in Croatia between the Two World Wars
1 March 2021, online lecture
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Video recording (in Croatian)

Ljubljana, 5 and 6 December 2019

We have recently celebrated a few respectable anniversaries of Slovenian art institutions. In 2017, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec celebrated its 60th anniversary. In 2018, we marked the centennial of the National Gallery of Slovenia and the 70th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. This year we are celebrating 65 years of the Maribor Art Gallery, 45 years of Božidar Jakac Art Museum in Kostanjevica na Krki, and the 110th anniversary of the opening of the Jakopič Pavilion, the first venue built expressly for the exhibition of art in Slovenia.

These important anniversaries are a good reason not only for celebration, but also for a more in-depth reflection on our over 100 years of practice in regularly exhibiting art, architecture, and design. The good response of the speakers and the variety of content related to exhibiting, recently researched and placed into an international context, prove the topicality of the symposium’s theme.

We open the symposium with the art societies that, in the middle of the 19th century, were the first to introduce in Slovene lands a more regular exhibiting of contemporaneous art. Further selected exhibitions, exhibition programmes, institutions, and other phenomena related to exhibiting are discussed and evaluated in a chronological order and from a variety of perspectives. A large share of the contributions reflect on the more lasting thematic, programmatic, geographic, or political orientations of the institutions, which have proven to be important, even decisive actors in directing and shaping our art field. We focus also on research on the accelerated institutionalisation of art, architecture, and design after World War II, and into how and why the wave of cyclic, especially biennial events occurred soon after. The symposium concludes with analyses of contemporary curatorial practices, new exhibition formats, and also new forms of institutions characteristic of recent decades. 
  
In addition to the delineated new knowledge, the symposium offers introspection and attempts to clarify those effects of our activity that are harder to trace. The desire for a more in-depth understanding of both the exhibition medium itself and the inner logic and workings of the Slovenian art system surface in reflections on how and why a certain approach to exhibiting appears and establishes itself, what its relation to the exhibited objects and art in general is, and how it intertwines with political and other non-art discourses and aspirations.

Thursday, 5 December 2019

10.00 Welcome by Blaž Peršin, director of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGLM), and Andreja Hribernik (KGLU), representative of the organising committee
 

Exhibitions in Slovenia before World War II
Chair: Beti Žerovc

10.10 Miha Valant: The Exhibition Activity of the Affiliate of the Austrian Art Association in Ljubljana (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.30 Renata Komić Marn: “As a Culturo-Historical Phenomenon, the Portrait is Practically Inexhaustible.” Portraits, Their Owners and Researchers in Light of the Exhibition of Portrait Painting in Slovenia (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.50 Maruša Dražil: Exhibitions at the Kos Salon and the Obersnel Gallery in the 1930s and 40s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11.10 Anja Iskra: Exhibiting During the Nazi Occupation. The Exhibition of Artists from Lower Styria in Maribor in September 1943 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11.30 Panel discussion

Cultural Politics and Exhibitions in Socialist Yugoslavia
Chair: Asta Vrečko

12.10 Katarina Mohar: The Exhibition of Soviet Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in 1947 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.30 Lovorka Magaš Bilandžić, Patricia Počanić: Exhibition Stan za naše prilike, Housing Development and Modern Living in Yugoslavia in the 1950s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.50 Teja Merhar: Yugoslavia’s International Cultural Cooperation with the Member States of the Non-Aligned Movement

14.30 Gregor Dražil: The US at the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
14.50 Megan C. McShane: Exhibiting OHO. David Nez’s Conceptual Work as Shown in Experimentally Significant Slovenian Exhibition Designs from 1969 (video of the lecture)
15.10 Ana Ereš: Exhibiting New Artistic Practices Abroad. The Case of 1976 Yugoslav Exhibition at the Venice Biennale
15.30 Panel discussion

Exhibitions of Architecture and Design
Chair: Martina Malešič

16.20 Cvetka Požar: The Exhibiting of Graphic Design in the 20th Century in Slovenia with an Emphasis on Poster Exhibitions (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16.40 Maja Vardjan: A Design Exhibition as a Catalyst of Change – The Ljubljana Biennial of Design (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17.00 Nika Grabar: The Architecture of Open Houses (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17.20 Panel discussion
 

Friday, 6 December 2019

Exhibitions and Exhibition Programmes in the 1970s and 80s
Chair: Katarina Mohar

9.30 Asta Vrečko: The 1979 Exhibition Slovenian Fine Art 1945–1978 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
9.50 Tina Fortič Jakopič: Art Exhibitions in Sales Galleries. The Cases of Ars Gallery and the Labirint Gallery (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.10 Andreja Hribernik: Exhibitions under the Auspices of the United Nations at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.30 Vasja Nagy-Hofbauer: Photography in the Piran Coastal Galleries (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.50 Panel discussion
 

Periodic Exhibitions
Chair: Andreja Hribernik

11.30 Meta Kordiš: The International Triennial of Ecology and Art – EKO (1980–2005–2020), Maribor (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11.50 Živa Brglez, Tjaša Pogačar: Festival as a Form of Exhibiting Intermedia Art. The Case of the International Festival of Computer Art in the Second Half of the 1990s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.10 Hana Ostan Ožbolt: Triennial of Contemporary (Slovene) Art – U3. Its Formation and the Change in Direction between the First and Second Editions in 1997 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.30 Panel discussion
 

Exhibitions and Networking
Chair: Urška Jurman

14.00 Petja Grafenauer, Nataša Ivanović: Exhibition Design – Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
14.20 Tihana Puc: Exhibiting in Slovenia. Exhibition Networks of Contemporary Artists from Croatia
14.40 Miha Kelemina: "Let Your Programme Make Mistakes, Otherwise It Will Turn into a Hamburger". The Influence of the SCCA Network and the Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana on Exhibiting in Slovenia in the 1990s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
15.00 Panel discussion
 

Exhibition as a Medium
Chair: Alenka Gregorič

16.00 Kaja Kraner: The Repositioning of National Art? The Exhibiting of the National and the International Collection of the Ljubljana's Museum of Modern Art from the 1990s Onward (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16.20 Domen Ograjenšek: The Epistemology of a Thematic Group Exhibition (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16.40 Alenka Pirman: Implants (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17.00 Panel discussion

Venue: City Museum of Ljubljana, Gosposka 15, Ljubljana

The symposium is being organised in cooperation with the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška and Božidar Jakac Art Museum, and supported by ERSTE Foundation.

The First World War monuments produced in interwar Yugoslavia are today usually discussed separately, within the context of the successor state to which they belong. The symposium will attempt to present a picture of this production that is as comprehensive as possible, outlining not only the common features of these works but also their differences, which to a large degree were conditioned by very diverse local traditions of commemoration and memorial creation.

The second goal of the symposium is to consider how these monuments are inscribed with desires to strengthen a common Yugoslav identity, establish a collective imaginary, and develop a distinctive visual image of the young state. Yugoslavia faced considerable difficulties in this area, which were fostered not only by internal inter-ethnic and political tensions and a poorly thought-out state cultural policy, but also by the lack of unifying shared stories and memories. Because, before unification, the different peoples of Yugoslavia had often found themselves in opposing political camps, stories from the past could even be extremely divisive for the young state.

The creation of monuments dedicated to the achievements and to the fallen soldiers of the First World War was itself a problematic task: both victors and vanquished found themselves living in the same country, and the burial and commemoration of soldiers from both sides were happening simultaneously. Monuments normally tell us, directly and overtly, that the dead did not die in vain and the living embody the values for which they fought, but in Yugoslavia after the First World War such monuments were impossible. A sense of solidarity, whether sincere or pragmatic, constrained the victors, at least initially, from freely exulting in euphoric triumphalist narratives. And the vanquished were even more constrained, for what had happened was the very reverse of what they had been fighting for, and there was no possible way to rationalize the deaths of the many who had fallen in battle.

Thursday, 18 October 2018: The Production of Monuments Associated with the First World War in Different Parts of Yugoslavia
Chaired by: Božidar Jezernik and Olga Manojlović Pintar

10:30 Introductions
11:00 Beti Žerovc: The Development of Public Monuments on the Territory of Future Yugoslavia (lecture in English)
11:30 Petra Svoljšak: Stones of Memory: How and Why were the Memorials Built during the First World War – The Case of the Slovenian Territory and the Isonzo Front (lecture in English)

12:30 Marko Štepec: The Monuments to the First World War in Slovenia (lecture in Slovenian)
13:00 Ljiljana Dobrovšak: The Places of Memory of the First World War in Croatia (lecture in Croatian) 
13:30 Andrea Baotić-Rustanbegović: The Monuments to the Victims of the First World War: Commemorative Practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina (lecture in English)

15:00 Nenad Lajbenšperger: The Monuments Dedicated to the First World War on the Territory of Serbia without Provinces, in Vojvodina and Abroad (lecture in English)
15:30 Danilo Šarenac: The Monuments Dedicated to the First World War on the Territory of Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro, and the Monuments to Foreign Soldiers in Serbia and Macedonia (lecture in English)
16:00 Panel discussion with the lecturers
 * 17:00 Individual lecturer consultations for students and monuments researchers (applications in advance: info@igorzabel.org)

Friday, 19 October 2018: The Monuments in Service of the State
Chaired by: Danilo Šarenac and Beti Žerovc

10:30 Olga Manojlović Pintar: The Monuments to the Heroes and Victims of the First World War and the Remembrance Policy in Yugoslavia (lecture in English)
11:00 Borut Klabjan: Violence in Space: Marking the Border Space in the Northern Adriatic in the First Half of the 20th Century (lecture in English)
11:30 Dalibor Prančević: Ivan Meštrović and the First World War: An Artistic Path from Emigrant Activism to the State Commissions (lecture in English)
12:30 Barbara Vujanović: Shaping the Nation: Interwar Monuments in the Context of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (lecture in English)
13:00 Aleksandar Ignjatović: Yugoslavism through the Syntax of Classicism: The Memorials to the First World War in Belgrade and Ljubljana, 1931–1939 (lecture in English)
13:30 Panel discussion with the lecturers

* 15:00 Individual lecturer consultations for students and monuments researchers (applications in advance: info@igorzabel.org)

Venue: Moderna galerija, Cankarjeva 15, Ljubljana
 

The symposium is dedicated to Špelca Čopič (1922–2014), an expert and interpreter of Slovenian and Yugoslav sculpture and public monuments in the 20th century. On this occasion, we will also remember her with a commemorative display.

Organizer: Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
The symposium is part of the seminar Art for Collective Use.

Partners: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory and Moderna galerija
The symposium is affiliated with the international research project and exhibition Visual Arts in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–41) that will be on view in spring 2019 at the Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art).

Together with the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana we cordially invite you to attend the new series of public lectures under the title Art Exhibiting in Slovenia, from the Early 19th Century to Today.

Within the seminar we are examining the development of exhibition practices and art institutions in Slovenia and Central Europe, as well as in the wider international context. Last year we began in the first half of the 19th century with the start of modern exhibition-making in the Slovene lands; this year and in the following years we then move through the evolution of exhibition-making and the institutionalization of the art field right up to the present day. We discuss various aspects of exhibition-making – institutions, exhibition installations, artworks, the audience, etc. – and examine selected phenomena relating to the institutionalization of art, especially exhibitions and ways to do them.

In the second year of the seminar, we look at art exhibiting in the Slovene lands and Central Europe from 1890 to 1918. In the Slovene lands, this period is marked by a pronounced expansion of the visual art field on various levels. We see a large growth in the number of working artists, many of whom join or come together in different formal and informal art associations, while some artists are also active on a broader cultural-political level. There are various initiatives for exhibiting and institutionalizing visual art, as well as several more visible actual achievements, such as the institution of the Slovene art exhibition (in 1900 and 1902 in Ljubljana, and 1907 in Trieste), Jakopič’s private exhibition space for contemporary art (1909), and the founding of the National Gallery Society (1918), which a few years later would acquire space in the building where the National Gallery is still housed today.

These advances at a provincial pace, follow the general European trends in the field of visual art and exhibition-making and are further defined, characteristically, by the position of the Slovene space and the political situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The entire period is marked by an explicit nationalism, which compels artists to take a vocal political stance in their work and, if they have a Slovene sensibility, to move closer to the Slavic world (e.g. Prague or the Balkans) instead of the usual orientation towards Western art centres. Nevertheless, Vienna and Munich remain the key art centres for our region and provide artists with a fundamental frame of reference, which they develop in relation to, use as their touchstone, and cite in their work. This is true also from a cultural-political and organizational perspective: the infrastructures of those two cities, and especially their art societies and Secessionist associations, serve as influential cultural-political and economic models for the infrastructural activity and self-organization of Slovene artists. In the seminar we seek to shed light on these developments, in part by reflecting on art institutions and exhibitions as mechanisms that arise from or at least are fuelled by the political and agitational needs of certain national and political groups. Exhibition-making proves to be, among other things, a crucial medium in the rapid construction and establishment of the phenomenon of Slovene visual art.

Beti Žerovc, leader of the programme

TOMAŽ BREJC

Ideas, Terms, Exhibitions and Paintings at the Beginning of Modernism

First Lecture: An Apology of Modern Art
15 January 2018, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

Second Lecture: Impression, Mood, Empathy and Expression
16 January 2018, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

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KATJA MAHNIČ

Josip Mantuani and the Painting Collection of the Provincial Museum of Carniola (1909–1924)
9 January 2018, 2.30 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording  (in Slovene)

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GUDRUN DANZER

The Art System in Graz from the Founding of the Styrian Art Society in 1865 until the End of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918, part I
Monday, 4 December 2017, 7 pm,  Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording

The Art System in Graz from the Founding of the Styrian Art Society in 1865 until the End of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918, part II
Tuesday, 5 December 2017, 7 pm,  Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording

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MICHELLE FACOS

Artists, Exhibitions and Institutions in the United States 1890–1918
Monday, 6 November 2017, 7 pm,  Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording

Artists, Exhibitions and Institutions in Scandinavia 1890–1918
Tuesday, 7 November 2017, 7 pm,  Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording

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GAŠPER CERKOVNIK
Christian Art Society of Ljubljana

Monday, 23 October 2017, 12 am,  Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

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Organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory; Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation, Austrian Cultural Forum

Together with the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana we cordially invite you to attend the series of public lectures that is part of the seminar Art for Collective Use: Art Exhibiting in Slovenia, from the Early 19th Century to Today.

In the series, over the course of the next few years, we will be examining the development of exhibition practices and art institutions in Slovenia and Central Europe, as well as in the wider international context. We will begin in the first half of the 19th century with the start of modern exhibition-making in the Slovene lands and then move through the evolution of exhibition-making and the institutionalization of the art field right up to the present day. We will discuss various aspects of exhibition-making – institutions, exhibition installations, artworks, the audience, etc. – and try to understand how and why exhibition-making appeared and became established in the region. We will examine the relationship between exhibitions and art and try to determine the kinds of exhibitions that have been successful in Slovenia and where problems most often occurred. We will pay attention to who organizes and/or finances exhibitions and why they do so. We will reflect on the role exhibitions played in the nationalist and political discourses of the 19th and 20th centuries and the role they play today.

Throughout the seminar we will be considering selected phenomena relating to the institutionalization of art, especially exhibitions and ways to do them. We will ask, for example, how artists such as Mihael Stroj, Anton Karinger, Ivana Kobilca, Rihard Jakopič, Avgust Černigoj, the Independents (Neodvisni), and the OHO Group made exhibitions and why they did it the way they did. How did the institutionalization of contemporary art develop so rapidly after World War II, and why did such an enormous surge of biennial exhibitions “happen” to us in the 1970s and 1980s? We will ask about the traditional role of curators in art exhibitions and look at the changes contemporary curatorial practices have brought to Slovene exhibition-making. By analysing concrete examples of exhibition practices, we will begin to see more clearly the inner logic and operational principles of the Slovene art system.

In the first year we will look at the 19th century, which saw the widespread introduction of general and professional education in the Slovene lands – including various kinds of drawing instruction (which provided employment or additional income to numerous painters). Eventually, the commissioning and collecting of art became established among the middle class, and the first institution for collecting and housing visual art (among other things) was founded, namely, the Provincial Museum of Carniola. In the 1860s, contemporary art begins to be shown regularly in group exhibitions at the Kazina in Ljubljana, which also leads to increasingly conscientious reporting on art and art events in the Carniolan press.

Because the positioning of the art system in the 19th century, both generally and within individual countries and provinces, represents the basis of today’s art system (as well as national art systems), and because many operational practices in the system are not developed from scratch but rather modify and extend older practices, we need a good grasp of the beginnings if we want to understand the evolution of both the art system and art in the 20th century and to the present time. The connections between art institutions and the development of the modern nation state, as well as the institutions’ connections with such phenomena as increasing secularization, globalization, and tourism, must be considered in order to understand why the situation in the art field is the way it is and why the art system has been able to grow stronger and expand so successfully right up to today. As Robert Jensen shows in his lucid study Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, aesthetic modernism from its very beginnings produced not only a body of artwork and scores of “-isms” but also a body of institutions and a matrix of practices, which, unlike modern art, was accepted almost without resistance by European and American art publics.

Beti Žerovc

NATAŠA IVANOVIĆ

Spectators and Viewing Areas at the Turn of the 19th Century in the Habsburg Monarchy: Landscape Graphics of Lovro Janša (1749–1812)
Tuesday, 25 October 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording  (in Slovene)

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ALESSANDRO QUINZI

The Trieste Art System in the First Half of the 19th Century
Monday, 7 November 2016, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

The Trieste Art System from Mid-19th Century to 1910
Tuesday, 8 November 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

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IVANA MANCE

Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski’s Slovnik umjetnikah jugoslavenskih (1858): The First Lexicon of Croatian and Slovenian Art
Tuesday, 29 November 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording  (in English)

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IRENA KRAŠEVAC

Arts Association: Exhibitions and the Organisation of Fine Arts Events in Zagreb in the 19th Century
Monday, 12 December 2016, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana

Video recording (in Croatian)

The Beginnings of Artistic Education in Zagreb in the 19th Century: From the Drawing School to the National Arts and Crafts School
Tuesday, 13 December 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Croatian)

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RENATA KOMIĆ MARN

The Art Market in Carniola in the Third Quarter of the 19th Century: Art-Collecting Practices of Eduard von Strahl (1817–1884)
Monday, 9 January 2017, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

Strahl’s Gallery in Stara Loka in the Context of Exhibiting Art in Carniola in the Third Quarter of the 19th Century 
Tuesday, 10 January 2017, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

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Organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory; Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana

Together with the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana we cordially invite you to attend a series of public lectures that are part of the Art for Collective Use Seminar. This year Seminar is being organized under the title Monument, Performance, Ritual, Body.

The seminar treats two distinctive art phenomena in Yugoslavia and its successor states: performance art and memorial monuments associated with World War II. Our discussion deals with the entire period from the end of the 19th century to the present, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, when both practices were at their high point.

The seminar’s primary subject comprises the monumental memorial works dedicated to events from World War II. These monuments can take very different forms and resist any uniform definition. The most ambitious memorializing projects may incorporate numerous structures of varying purposes, including cultural and regional centres (e.g. the Memorial Centre in Kolašin or the Monument at Petrova Gora) or make sweeping changes to the landscape (e.g. the well-marked and well-ordered system of paths for strolling and recreation that constitute the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship in Ljubljana). Today especially, it seems, we are fascinated by monumental objects of extraordinary dimensions that tend toward very purified forms or abstraction and that are situated in remote nature (e.g. the monuments in Tjentište and on Mrakovica Peak on Mt. Kozara). The tradition of building such monuments is very much alive even today, only the ideological principles behind their creation are different (e.g. the Memorial Park in Teharje and the not-yet-completed Monument to the Victims of All Wars in Ljubljana).

Another very impressive chapter of Yugoslav art can be seen in the former country’s diverse performance-art practices. Yugoslav performance artists (such as Marina Abramović, the OHO group, Sanja Iveković, and others) were well informed and very well connected internationally; important foreign representatives of this art form (such as Gina Pane, Ana Mendieta, Joseph Beuys, and Walter De Maria) also came to Yugoslavia on visits or for art events. While it is extremely difficult to find a common denominator in Yugoslav performance art, it eventually acquired the general label of an explicitly political art. In relation to our topic, two points seem interesting: first, a number of key performance artists came from the families of prominent state officials or personages in post-war Yugoslavia, and, second, this fact is explicitly underscored in their biographies.

The juxtaposition of monumental memorial projects and performance art may seem unusual – at first glance they have nothing in common. The differences in their media, their intentions, and their audiences are all too apparent. But analysis also reveals a number of convergences and similarities: both practices were at their height at practically the same time; both contain strong aspects of ritual and very actively include the body; both forms possess a great ability to stir intense emotions and establish identity; and both reach for extremes in ways that are entirely calculated and deliberate.

After the collapse of Yugoslavia, the World War II monuments often became targets of verbal and physical attacks, but in recent years a more positive fascination with these works has been persistently on the rise. Maybe, for many, the fascination comes from the monuments’ extraordinary appearance, which at times works in connection with a Romantic delight in socialist ruins. Some, however, are puzzled by how it was possible to establish modernist principles on such a mass scale and achieve such remarkable results specifically in the practice of public monumental memorials, which was generally not inclined toward the broad use of consistently implemented modernist methods – and this in a time and place that today is often labelled totalitarian. Given that the commissioners of such works were as much “responsible” for them as the artists were, the question is: why did they act as they did?

Beti Žerovc

Lectures will be held in English.

SONJA LEBOŠ

Bogdan Bogdanović – Architecture as Applied Anthropology
Monday, 5 October 2015, at 6 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Ljubljana
Video recording

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HEIKE KARGE

Stony Memory – Petrified Memory? World War II Memory and Monuments in Yugoslavia
Monday, 9 November 2015, at 12 pm, Faculty of Arts
Video recording

Monuments’ Biographies – The Case of Jasenovac
Monday, 9 November 2015, at 6 pm, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), Ljubljana
Video recording

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SANJA HORVATINČIĆ 

Genealogy of Form. Typology of the Monuments to People's Liberation Struggle, Revolution and the Labour Movement in Croatia
Tuesday, 10 November 2015, at 1 pm, Faculty of Arts
Video recording

The Meaning and Possibility of a Monument. The Artistic Production and Critical Reception of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia
Wednesday, 11 November 2015, at 6 pm, +MSUM
Video recording

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BOJANA PEJIĆ 
The Making of the Communist Body: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power in the SFR Yugoslavia (1945-1991)

Lecture 1: Body at Work
Monday, 16 November 2015, at 1 pm, Faculty of Arts
Video recording

Lecture 2: The Production of the Unknown Heroine
Tuesday, 17 November 2015, at 6 pm, +MSUM
Video recording

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MECHTILD WIDRICH 

Lecture 1: Delegated Performance, Delegated Architecture
Monday, 11 January 2016, at 1 pm, Faculty of Arts
Video recording

Conversation between Beti Žerovc and Mechtild Widrich on the Performative Monuments book
Tuesday, 12 January 2016, at 1 pm, Faculty of Arts
Video recording

Lecture 2: Performative Monuments
Tuesday, 12 January 2016, at 6 pm, +MSUM
Video recording

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ART FOR COLLECTIVE USE SEMINAR

This multiyear seminar focuses on art that is created for communal use, acceptance, experience, or rituals and that is usually displayed in the public space. Such work is often marked by a specific “collective authorship”, as not only the artist, but also the ones who commissioned or initiated the work play a significant role in its creation; they may be the politicians or citizens who erect a memorial or symbolically important building, or the curator who prepares an exhibition based on their own concept. Such artwork must, as a rule, encompass and promote the interests of the various people involved in its making, which means that it often originates through a complex and at times quite painful process. Its creation/existence can be a source of long-term contention for the community in which it is located and can have a profound effect on questions of personal or communal identity; its unveiling or destruction can be an event laden with important symbolism. Such artwork can also play an active role in the life practice of a community (sometimes for centuries); it may be included in the community’s everyday life or holidays, in the development of the collective memory or the collective forgetting, and in debates about values, about what is right and what is wrong.

In the seminar we deal mainly with Slovenian secular art from the period of the national reading rooms (čitalnice) to the present. We try to determine when, where, how and why such forms of visual address occurred: Who are the groups or individuals who encourage and commission such artworks and whom are they addressing through these works? What kind of visual art is created in such circumstances and what messages does it convey? How does it enter into various life practices? Do the reception and function of such artworks remain constant over time or do they change? We closely examine the effects of such works and whether they are in fact able to fulfil the demands of their initiators and creators.

Seminar topics:
2014–15: architecture and the exhibiting of contemporary art (Andrea Baotić, Jasna Galjer)
2015–16: memorial monuments associated with World War II and performance art

Organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory; Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana; Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation