Jože Barši, a retrospective exhibition

19 March - 6 May 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3

Curated by Bojana Piškur.

This exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova is the first large-scale presentation of this middle-generation artist.

Jože Barši (1955) has degrees in architecture and sculpture, but his practice cannot be defined exclusively by either of these fields.
In this sense also his meanders in art can be more easily understood: from the deconstruction of the sculptural object in the mid-1990s, to a shift to some sort of architectural explorations of space and their subsequent expansion into installations, the use value of an artwork, and its social and relational value, to more conceptual practices, such as walking, sound, conversations, readings, and registers of knowledge.
In 1997, Barši represented Slovenia at the Venice Biennale with a presentation organized by Moderna galerija. Two years later his work Public Toilet, a functional sculpture, was included in the first public presentation of the international Arteast 2000+ collection at Metelkova; here the building actually served its purpose. Barši had several other presentations of his work under the auspices of Moderna galerija: at the U3 Triennials of Contemporary Slovenian Art in 1997 and 2010 and at group shows 7 Sins (Moderna galerija, 2004/2005) and Oscillations: 30 Days of Sound (Mala galerija, 2005). In 1999 he had a solo exhibition at the Mala galerija; entitled House, it presented his views on participation in art as the opposite pole of creating autonomous objects. More recently Barši has focused most of his interest on forgotten or ignored texts of political philosophy and art. The copies of texts (whole books, chapters, or shorter texts) appear not only as an art form but as content that Barši analyses and then presents to the public.
In addition to the above-mentioned exhibitions staged by Moderna galerija, Barši's work has been featured at the Istanbul Biennial (1995), the 24th International Biennial of Graphic Arts (2001), as part of the project Unusual Pairs in Celje (2001), the exhibitions Walking (2001), and Conversations (2006) at the Škuc Gallery, and at numerous other international and Slovenian exhibitions, artist-in-residence programs, workshops, and conferences. He has won the Golden Bird award for visual inter-media art and works as a full-time professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana.
The exhibition does not follow a linear chronological order in presenting the artist's works, but focuses on a few central themes around which Barši's output since the late 1990s can be grouped: "architecture", "participation", "perception" and "knowledge".

Designed by New Collectivism, the exhibition catalogue includes texts by Jože Barši, Mladen Dolar, Bojana Piškur, Rado Riha and Adela Železnik.