Arteast Collection 2000+23

22.09.2006

Exhibition curator: Zdenka Badovinac
22 September - 22 October 2006
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

Participating artists:
Marina Abramović / Jan Mlčoch; Jérôme Bel / Vlado Martek; Goran Bertok / I have not chosen anyone from the collection; Dara Birnbaum / Kazimir Malevich; Mateja Bučar / With my true respect for the Arteast Collection 2000+; Bojana Cvejić / Julije Knifer; Deufert & Plischke / Geta Brătescu; Cristian Duarte & Thelma Bonavita / Mirosław Bałka; Eclipse / Laibach; Elmgreen & Dragset / Marko Peljhan; Tim Etchells / Tomislav Gotovac; Jo Fabian / Róza El-Hassan; Jan Fabre / Nedko Solakov; Gil & Moti / Alex Mlynárčik; Lynn Hershman / Zofia Kulik; Irwin / Ilija Šoškić; Edward Janssen / Slaven Tolj; Eduardo Kac / Vuk Ćosić; Kinkaleri / Jože Barši (Martina Bastarda, Mateja Ocepek, Nataša Skušek); Mala Kline / Ilya Kabakov; Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki / Goran Petercol; Iztok Kovač / Arsen Savadov; Laibach / Mladen Stilinović; Tanja Lažetić / Josef Dabernig ; Eva & Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org) / New Collectivism ; Nina Meško / Ivan Kožarić; Peter Mlakar / OHO; Rabih Mroué / Vladimir Kupriyanov; Ivana Müller / Dmitry Prigov; Olaf Nicolai / Sanja Iveković; New Collectivism / Vadim Fiškin; Erna Omarsdottir / Katarzyna Kozyra; Orlan / Paul Neagu; Virpi Pahkinen / Karel Miller; Marko Pogačnik / Dan Perjovschi; Nikolina & Goran Sergej Pristaš / Milan Knížák; Melinda Rackham / Anish Kapoor; Andreja Rauch / Jusuf Hadžifejzović; Vlado Repnik / Natalia LL; Jan Ritsema / Uri Tzaig; Ivani Santana / Milica Tomić; Dimitrina Sevova / Oliver Musovik; Nicolas Siepen & Tara Herbst / Alexandr Kosolapov; Igor Štromajer / Andrei Monastirsky; Ubermorgen.com / Irwin; Brane Zorman & Irena Pivka / Lawrence Weiner; Dunja Zupančič :: Dragan Živadinov / Edvard Stepančič; Matjaž Zupančič / Marina Abramović

Press conference: Friday, 22 September 2006, at 11 a.m., Information center
Opening: Friday, 22 September 2006, at 8 p.m., Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
Performance at the opening: ECLIPSE Mysteries of the Orgasm - a study,
Friday, 22 September 2006, at 8 p.m.

The exhibition Arteast Collection 2000+23 is, first of all, a display of selected works from the Moderna galerija's collections, predominantly the Arteast Collection 2000+, as well as a number of proposals, concepts and ideas for works this collection should acquire by the year 2023.

Why specifically the year 2023? Because that is when Maska will publish its 200th issue, and it is this magazine that proposed our exhibition in the first place, as part of the celebrations for its 100th issue, which appears this fall. When Emil Hrvatin, Maska's editor in chief, approached us with the idea of the Moderna galerija putting together an exhibition that would, in one way or another, include the artists the magazine has written about in all its previous issues, the challenge seemed to be one of working with a predetermined group of artists for whom this could well be their first presentation in a gallery space. Maska, after all, deals primarily with contemporary theater arts, although in the pages of the magazine these are also to a large extent intertwined with contemporary visual art.
The collaboration between the Moderna galerija and Maska was designed from the outset as a collaboration between the artists the magazine writes about and artworks from our collections.

The initial proposal, that we assemble an exhibition of previously selected artists, led Zdenka Badovinac, the exhibition curator, to the decision to relinquish the curator's selector role entirely, thus leaving it to the "Maska artists" to also choose the artworks from the Moderna galerija's collections; her curatorial role, meanwhile, would be constructed primarily around the following questions: Who is the one who chooses? And, to take it even further, who in fact is the true subject in the process of historicization?
The answer to this latter question depends entirely on whether we insist on historicization as a type of scientific method, and therefore an organized system, or whether we dare to conceive it as the mapping of heterogeneous ways of thinking and creating.

The Moderna galerija began systematically dealing with the processes of redefining history, the questions of the avant-garde traditions and the international context of Slovene art, predominantly related to eastern Europe, already in 1998 with the exhibition Body and the East, and continued with starting, and in 2000 first publicly displaying, the Arteast Collection 2000+. Next followed a series of Arteast exhibitions: Form-Specific in 2003, the 7 Sins: Ljubljana-Moscow in 2004, the Interrupted Histories in 2006, while the Arteast Collection 2000+23 is the most recent in the series.

While in the Interrupted Histories the artists were presented in the role of archivists, they appear in Arteast Collection 2000+23 as selectors of other artists. When Eastern European artists assume the functions of archivists, curators and selectors, they link art to a function, or a necessity, that has no parallel in the activities carried our by Western artists, even though the works may appear similar in terms of esthetics.
Nowadays we are faced, on the one hand, with the need to present the differences in the art of different spaces, and on the other, with the need for comparable systems, which seem prerequisite for a global history. The artists presented in our exhibitions historicize outside the established classification systems. They employ informal historicizing methods, either because there are no such formal methods in their spaces of origin, or because the formal methods can no longer keep up with art that increasingly evades standardized classifications.

The exhibition has been supported by:
Ministrstvo za kulturo Republike Slovenije, Mestna občina Ljubljana, Pristop, Renderspace
Mediapool

Media sponsors:
SiOL, TV Slovenija, Mladina, Burda, Radio Študent, TV Paprika, Radio Center