Museum in the Street

23 September - 19 October 2008
Program of Events

Participants:
Alterazioni Video, Velibor Barišić, Jože Barši, Ajdin Bašić & Žiga Testen, Viktor Bernik, Sezgin Boynik, Jasmina Cibic, Vadim Fiškin, Dejan Habicht, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Minna Henriksson, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Irwin, Jaša, Gal Kirn, Miklavž Komelj, Gašper Kralj, Andreja Kulunčić & Ibrahim Ćurić & Said Mujić & Osman Pezić, Tanja Lažetić, Polonca Lovšin, Nebojša Milikić, Novi kolektivizem, Cesare Pietroiusti, Anja Planišček, Tadej Pogačar, Marko Pogačnik, Marjetica Potrč, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Franc Purg, radioCona, Renata Salecl, Sašo Sedlaček, son:DA, Zora Stančič, Mladen Stropnik, Kateřina Šeda, Nika Špan, Igor Štromajer, Tomaž Tomažin, Endre Tót, Matej Andraž Vogrinčič & Vuk Ćosić
Curators: Zdenka Badovinac, Bojana Piškur

The Museum in the Street project presents the specific features of Ljubljana from a different angle by redefining the concept of art in public spaces. The phenomenon of art interventions in public spaces, first introduced in Slovenia by the artists' collective OHO in the 1960s, still remains to be researched using contemporary methodology, and critically reflected on. The Museum in the Street project attempts to do this by focusing on the representations of the city, urban identity, explorations / the mapping of the city, interventions in the city, and urban visions.

With the new global order and the subsequent different conceptualization of space, public space has literally disappeared. Jürgen Habermas' idea of the public sphere as that segment of social life where public opinion is formulated is thus rendered obsolete. Today, public spaces are controlled and programmed, they are shrinking and disappearing. We are faced with a new spatiality, which cannot be categorized in such an orderly way as before. There is no longer a single public space; now it is divided into spaces of various identities that are not based only on positivism, but include also a negative component.

In the context of the Museum in the Street project, artists, theoreticians, and activists will explore and intervene in the so-called urban antagonisms, that is, those aspects of the city that are both present and at the same time invisible, marginalized, and repressed, making them in this way visible in a new, artistic context. The project has three main topics: urban extremes (urban fears and anxieties, xenophobia, pollution, civil disobedience and crime, rumors and gossip), urban margins (parallel strategies of survival, self-organizing practices, migrants, workers' hostels, the "erased", marginalized schools on the city's outskirts), and urban antagonisms (partisan monuments, modernist architecture, vestiges of rural life).

Museum in the Street is being staged while the Moderna galerija building is undergoing renovation work.

More on the Program of events

Don't miss the radioCona program broadcast at 88.8 MHz between
24 September and 2 October 2008

Take part in the community intervention

TIKam
www.TiKam.si

Information point of the project: Mala galerija, Slovenska 35, open daily from noon to 8 p.m.

More info: Adela Železnik, 01/2416808,
adela.zeleznik@mg-lj.si

Related events:

Monday, 20 October 2008, at 7 p.m.
T5 Project Space (Tobacna 5)

International symposium
Participants: Susan Kelly, Cylena Simonds (UK); Marko Sancanin, Platforma Zagreb (Croatia) and presentations of Slovenian projects.

The idea of public art is obsolete, since it relates to modernism and its binary dichotomies, specifically a clear division between public and private spheres. Today, public space is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of public spaces and/or their various combinations, which are all increasingly subject to the logic of capital and private interests and structured accordingly. This has produced the need for greater control over and new ways of managing these spaces, ways that exclude all the undesirable elements, which leads to rapid gentrification. The issue of public art thus relates to the issue of public space and its politicization. In this context we will focus on the following questions: Who comprises the audience? What kind of authority does an artist have? Is public art compatible with private interests? Does public art have the power to foster various political views and visions that differ from the predominant discourses? A panel discussion will attempt to provide answers to these and related questions.

The symposium has been organised in frames of the Museum in the Street, a project organised by the Moderna galerija while its building is undergoing renovation work and curated by Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana Piskur. The symposium will be in English.

Susan Kelly is an artist and writer based in London. Her work is concerned with the relationship between art, rhetoric and the micro-political. She is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London.

Cylena Simonds is an independent curator and writer based in London. Initiating contemporary art programming through exhibitions, new project commissions and critical texts she seeks to offer new ways of understanding political and social subjectivities. Key to her professional philosophy is curating as a vital creative practice realised collaboratively with artists to disseminate critical observations and reflections.

Marko Sancanin is a senior researcher for Platforma 9,81 - Institute for Research and Architecture in Zagreb.

Opening events:

23 September 2008

10 a.m. - noon
Renata Salecl and pupils from the Ledina Elementary School
Fear Not, Urska!
drawing with chalk on the Hribarjevo nabrezje embankment

noon
Ištvan Išt Huzjan
A sports airplane flight over the center of Ljubljana
action

7 p.m.
Jeanne van Heeswijk and associates
You and the City. Diaries of a Future Avant-garde
opening performance at the Tobacco Factory (Tobacna 5)

20.30
Alterazioni Video
The Big Čevapčič
action on the Three Bridges

21.00
Opening ceremony at the City Museum