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25/11/2011

Opening MSUM + two exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova MSUM, Ljubljana

More than 15 years after the time Moderna galerija was allotted the use of one of the buildings in the former Yugoslav People's Army barracks in Metelkova Street, the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM), the new unit of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, is finally opening. The MSUM will house the collection of contemporary art (the national and the international Arteast 2000+ collections) and stage a related exhibitions program. Located in MSUM there are also some of the expanded institution's professional services: the archives, the library and the restoration-conservation studio.

THE EXHIBITIONS

The Present and Presence
A selection of works from the Arteast 2000+ Collection and the national collection of Moderna galerija

Jury Albert, Nika Autor, Mirosłav Bałka, Jože Barši, Viktor Bernik, Borghesia, Carlfriedrich Claus, Vuk Ćosić, Vlasta Delimar, Braco Dimitrijević, Róza El-Hassan, Stano Filko, Vadim Fiškin, Bojan Gorenec, Gorgona, Tomaž Gregorič, Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid, Dmitry Gutov, Dejan Habicht, Jusuf Hadžifejzović, Jenny Holzer, International Strike of Artists, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Irwin, Sanja Iveković, Sanja Iveković & Dalibor Martinis, Janez Janša & Janez Janša & Janez Janša, Sergej Kapus, Žiga Kariž, Komar & Melamid, Alexandr Kosolapov, Marko Kovačič, Ivan Kožarić (Gorgona), Zofia Kulik, Kwiekulik, Laibach, Yuri Leiderman, Zmago Lenardič & Jasna Hribernik, Kazimir Malevich, David Maljković, Vlado Martek, Anja Medved & Nadja Velušček, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec , Alex Mlynárčik, Paul Neagu, New Collectivism, New Collectivism & Scipion Nasice Theatre, Neue Slowenische Kunst, OHO (Marko Pogačnik), OHO (Tomaž Šalamun), Oktobar 75, Oral Histories, Dimitry Orlach, Tanja Ostojić, Alen Ožbolt, Adrian Paci, Marko Peljhan, Amalia Perjovschi, Dan Perjovschi, Goran Petercol, Alenka Pirman, Tadej Pogačar, Marko Pogačnik, Marjetica Potrč, Dmitry Prigov, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Punk Museum, Franc Purg, Tobias Putrih, Alexandr Roitburd, Vinko Rozman, Arsen Savadov & Georgiy Senchenko, Nedko Solakov, Son: Da, Zora Stančič, Mladen Stilinović, Tone Stojko, Nebojša Šerić-Šoba, Nika Špan, Jane Štravs, Miha Štrukelj, Raša Todosijević, Slaven Tolj, Endre Tót, Goran Trbuljak, TV Gallery, Jiří Valoch, Josip Vaništa (Gorgona), Gyula Várnai, Sašo Vrabič, Edvard Zajec, Konstantin Zvezdochiotov, Želimir Žilnik, Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič, MihaTuršič

Curated by Zdenka Badovinac, Bojana Piškur, Igor Španjol

Team of co-authors: Dunja Blažević (TV Gallery), Andreja Hribernik (Oral Histories), Igor Vidmar (Punk Museum)

While the exhibition of works from the national collection at Moderna galerija/ Museum of Modern Art ends with 1991, i.e. the year Slovenia gained independence, the display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSUM) includes works dating back to the 1960s. Contemporaneity has two beginnings: a conceptual one in the 1960s, when most of the aesthetic concepts artists are interested in today were shaped; and a chronological one in the beginning of the 1990s, when the new era began, marked by the fall of Eastern European communist regimes, the collapse of Yugoslavia and several other multinational states, rapid globalization, and the increasingly widespread use of digital technology. The concept of contemporaneity and the related concentration of specific artistic interests thus cannot be treated only chronologically. For this reason the exhibition of the collection at the MSUM problematizes time and focuses on its liberating potential.
The present is not necessarily the same as contemporaneity. Giorgio Agamben argues that to be contemporary means to be inattuale ? irrelevant or not suited to the time: "Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this rejection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time." Contemporaneity, as understood in these terms, is called presence; this means an active relationship towards one's own time. Meanwhile, here the current chronological period is called as the present, that is to say, the period in which we are living. Contemporary art must be described as belonging at one and the same time both to the present and to presence.

* Giorgio Agamben, "What is Contemporary?", What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, tr. David Kishik and Stephen Petadella, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., USA 2009, p. 40.

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Museum of Affects. In the framework of L'Internationale *

Artists: Francesc Abad, Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Eugenia Balcells, John Baldessari, Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, K.P. Brehmer, Stanley Brouwn, James Lee Byars, René Daniels, Paul De Vree, Luc Deleu, Daniel Dewaele, Lili Dujourie, Miklos Erdely, Öyvind Fahlström, Esther Ferrer, Robert Filliou, Dan Flavin, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Jef Geys, Tomislav Gotovac, Eulalia Grau, Ion Grigorescu, Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, Grup de Treball, Tibor Hajas, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, René Heyvaert, Hamlet Hovsepian, Sanja Iveković, On Kawara, Julije Knifer, Jiři Kovanda, Vladimir Kuprijanov, Jacques Lizene, Ivica Matić, Danny Matthys, Guy Mees, Miralda, Jan Mlčoch, Andrej Monastirsky, Muntadas, Bruce Nauman, Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, the OHO group (Milenko Matanović, Marko Pogačnik), Panamarenko, Carlos Pazos, Josep Ponsatí, Manolo Quejido, Joan Rabascall, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Benet Rossell, Ed Ruscha, Mladen Stilinović, Ilija Šoškić, Petr Štembera, Toon Tersas, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Josip Vaništa, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner

Curated by:
Bart de Baere, Bartomeu Marí with Bojana Piškur, Leen De Backer, Teresa Grandas

The Museum of Affects exhibition brings together four important European museums: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerpen (M HKA). The institutions have joined forces to challenge the present canons of art history and replace them with transnational, pluralistic cultural narratives and approaches.

How to go about this? How to address similarities and differences in a new way? The Museum of Affects exhibition is one possible approach. It brings together works that emerged out of various events between 1957 and 1986. The circumstances under which these works were produced range from the totalitarian regimes in the former Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia to the cultural oppression under Franco's regime in Spain and the specific situation in the Lowlands. In addition, pop art, minimalist, and conceptualist works from the then hegemonic North American art system are included in the show.

The main focus of the exhibition is not the formal and cultural positioning of these works, neither is it a comparative analysis between them, but rather the notion of affects, the power of affecting and being affected. We define this power as a resonance with artworks, where artworks become events made of intensities, which leave certain traces in space and time and, above all, on or within our bodies and minds.

Affects involve both feeling and cognition; a sensory experience and an intellectual activity. What is more, affects are also a change, a politics, a rupture, an unknown power. Affects cannot be instrumentalized because they cannot be read or represented. On the other hand, affects can be controversial, especially when linked to certain ideologies and/or totalitarianisms.

What then are the intensities that inform a work? What is the potentiality of an artwork? How do we think of art as event? And how do we work out the antagonisms between affects, representation and the art system in the exhibition itself?

Questions such as these force us to think beyond the defined methodologies of academic art history and its formal analyses, which might incite a different kind of approach towards the exhibited works; or more precisely, the idea of the exhibition is not so much about interpreting the works of art as it is about the specific affective experiences that these works trigger.

For this reason the following groupings were applied: the desire for actual social change through the critique of the system and the media; the desire for symbolic social change and the creation of alternative systems; understanding the world by making invisible structures or energies visible; using the world as material for ironic critique; the desire to articulate the world as semantics and immediacy; and articulating the self in the world as experience.

*The founding partners of L'Internationale are the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, the Július Koller Society in Bratislava, the Museu d?Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in Barcelona, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp (MuHKA).

Besides the two exhibitions a number of special projects will be on view at the opening: Connections, a special set of rooms in which artist Apolonija Šušteršič has developed, together with MSUM, programs for the museum's interactive connections with its audience and various local and international agents, in particular the L'Internationale network. Also the artist's previous projects on the role of the museum of contemporary art in society are presented with documentary material.
The Depository bookstore, also conceived by Apolonija Šušteršič in collaboration with students of architecture and based on the idea of a storage room full of books that opens to the public.
e-flux video rental (EVR), a project by artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, consisting of a video archive, a projection space, and a free video rental. Conceived in 2004, the project was first presented at 53 Ludlow Street in New York. In 2010 the artists donated the entire video archive to Moderna galerija in Ljubljana.

The opening of the museum is marked by two other important donations—a drawing on the entrance to the new museum by the internationally acclaimed Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, In 1990 We Spoke About Freedom, Now We Speak About Money, 2011, analyzing the phenomenon of the artists' struggle for survival between smaller and smaller state subsidies and greater and greater private influence in art; and the two-institution logo MG+MSUM, a donation Moderna galerija received from its longstanding collaborators, the New Collectivism group.

This project was supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, The Spanish Embassy in Ljubljana, the Mondriaan Foundation.

Image: Tomislav Gotovac, installation at Mala galerija, 2009

Press contact: Adela Železnik, tel. +386 1 2416808 adela.zeleznik@mg-lj.si

Press conference: Friday, November 25th, at 11 am
Gala opening of the museum and the new permanent display, Saturday, 26 November 2011, 8 p.m.

Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM)
Tomsiceva 14 - Maistrova 3, Ljubljana
Opening hours from 10 am till 6 pm.
Closed on Mondays.
Free admission

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