Katarina Zdjelar and Mladen Dolar

Katarina Zdjelar, The Perfect Sound, 2009, photography from video

Tuesday, 8 December 2009, at 6 p.m.
Moderna galerija, auditorium

You are kindly invited to the presentation of Katarina Zdjelar's work and her conversation with the philosopher Mladen Dolar on Tuesday, 8 December, at 6 p.m., in the auditorium of the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

The conversation will be based on Katarina Zdjelar's video works under the title "But if you Take my voice, what will be left to me?", which were included in the Serbian pavilion at this year's Venice Biennial.
The encounter with Katarina Zdjelar represents a very productive intersection of two approaches to the problem of the voice and sound, with theoretical reflection immediately overlapping artistic practice.

Katarina Zdjelar investigates what happens to subjectivity and communication
in a foreign language, when a mental and physical struggle with language occurs. Her work explores processes of self-realization with all their paradoxes, promises and failures. As a foreign artist based in the Netherlands, she finds a way to situate her own experience of dislocation by investigating forms of regulated systems of communication and learning, rather than focus on the loss churned out by this dislocation. Language learning is of particular significance for Zdjelar as this is a codified method of cultural integration not only involving a symbolic "rite of passage" of the uprooted individual, but also the very material and corporeal affects shaping this "speaking body".

Her interest in language did not initially arise from some theoretical linguistic concerns but out of practical applications of a "caring control" imposed by regulated systems of social adoption and inclusion in the developed, liberal societies of the world. In recent years, her work has become a highly articulated investigation of the manifold ways in which to negotiate between the code of language and the physicality of speech, as well as an investigation into the ways in which language draws us together into communities and how it makes space and clears space away.

Katarina Zdjelar was born in 1979 in Belgrade and is currently based in Rotterdam.

Mladen Dolar taught for twenty years in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he now is a senior research fellow. He is a specialist in the areas of German idealism, French structuralism and psychoanalysis, and has made an ample contribution to the philosophy of music, literature and art. He has presented lectures at numerous foreign universities, especially in the USA. In addition to numerous papers published in Slovene and foreign theory journals, he has published eight books in Slovene, the most recent being On Avarice (2002), On Voice (2003) and Prosopopoia (2006). His most important books in foreign languages are A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006, appearing in several translations as well), Wenn die Musik der Liebe Nahrung ist (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2001) and, with Slavoj Žižek, Opera's Second Death (London: Routledge, 2002).

The event is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.