WORLD OF ART
School for curators and critics of contemporary art
Year 13
Exhibition
April 13 – May 6, 2011
Alkatraz Gallery, Metelkova City, Ljubljana
You are cordially invited to the opening of the final exhibition of the13th year of the World of Art school on Wednesday, 13th April, at 8pm at the Alkatraz Gallery, Metelkova City.
Artist:Tadej Pogačar
Curators: Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, Mojca Založnik
Tutors: Jože Barši, Nevenka Šivavec
It was in April 2010 that we started with the 13th year of the rearranged school of the World of Art, based on the solid foundation of a several-year long research of various curatorial courses, analyses of curatorial practices, consultations with competent local and international experts as well as the evaluation of the past course. The 13th year has two terms: the 1st term (April–June 2010) was devoted to the acquisition of art-historical, theoretical, and methodological knowledge, the 2nd term (September 2010 – May 2011), however, to curatorial and critical studies as well as practical tests. The first term was attended by 11 participants, and there were 8 candidates registered at the second term. They were dealing with the conception and execution of the final exhibition under the tutorship of Nevenka Šivavec and Jože Barši.
The attendants of the course, namely Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, and Mojca Založnik, have chosen a monographic exhibition, a rare occasion in the history of the school (all the exhibitions with the exception of the one in 2008 of a Rumanian artist Mircea Nicolae, were group ones).
The final act of the one-year curatorial education is a solo exhibition of Tadej Pogačar, and the co-operation will continue next June at the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad.
Tadej Pogačar: Quarter to Two, 1994
Installation at the permanent installation of Selected works of Slovenian authors from the collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 1994–1995
Photo: Matija Pavlovec, Courtesy of the author and Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana
Tadej Pogačar: Quarter to Two
In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art invited Tadej Pogačar and his institution P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. museum to intervene at the exhibition of works that had been recently included into the gallery’s collection. With his work, entitled Fifteen to Two, Pogačar intervened in the exhibition by changing the gallery space into a waiting room. Above the main entrance into the room he hung a non-operating clock, set to fifteen minutes to two – the time when employees were already getting ready to leave their work posts for home. The exits leading into other exhibition spaces were marked with signs of the four directions, but not in the right order, and there were two rows of chairs in the middle of the space.
With minimal means and the formal gap between this work that has never found its way into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the exhibited ones that had become part of this collection, the artistic intervention appealed to the idea of waiting of the artist and the artworks for the competent institutions who have the authority to recognise, historicize, elevate or dump works of art.
Reformulation of the artwork Fifteen to Two in 2011 does not mean the trendy re-enactment, but stripping, radicalization of the position of production of knowledge. Pogačar enters the institution as a place of exposure, a space where classification and allocation are carried out, where there are mechanisms of institution at work: its order, its filters, codes and collections, enabling the construction of the history. That’s why Pogačar’s intention is not to pull down the institution, but – by showing the space that determines the methods and logic of selection – to show his position of entering and displaying at the same time. This is, however, an auto-productive discourse as the institution is not the one that produces the rules, but the rules themselves establish a certain phenomenon as an institution. In other words – it is the act of placing of some structural point under magnifying glass. If Pogačar has, with his original work within the pseudo-institution of P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. , entered into a specific, content-filled space, whose purpose was to lure from the invisibility into visibility, from ignorance into the system of knowing (the system of art), then today the intervention itself is all that’s left. There is no positive content needed to be historicised or granted a status through the mechanisms of institution. This does not, however, affect the mechanisms operating at a certain space permeated with institutional codes. The desire of the institutional apparatus after the production of value is resistant to any shortfall, as the mechanism operates universally, regardless of the accompanying changing parameters. The clock says “fifteen to two”, the work time is slowly ticking out, and the employees will soon leave for home, but the wheels of the mechanism still go on unobstructed …
Pogačar’s language infiltrates itself into the language of the museum. In such a way it compels the museum to reproduce and represent with its already conceived language simultaneously also a part of the speech and visual code of the artist. So, even though this intervention will also pass through the very same mechanisms that it has problematized and will thus enter into Knowledge, it will at the same time – with each reproduction of itself within this system – repeat its own basic critical gesture.
Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, Mojca Založnik
Production: SCCA, Center for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana / World of Art
Co-production: KUD Mreža / Alkatraz Gallery
Support: Municipality of Ljubljana City, Department for Culture, Ministry of Culture of the RS
Alkatraz Gallery, Metelkova City
Opening hours: Monday-Thursday, 11am-3pm and 4pm-8pm, Friday, 3pm-11pm
Please title the photos as follows:
Tadej Pogačar, Quarter to Two, 1994
Installation at the permanent installation of Selected works of Slovenian authors from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 1994–1995
Photo: Matija Pavlovec
Courtesy of the author and Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana
Tadej Pogačar (b. 1960) is an artist and the art director of the Centre and P74 Gallery in Ljubljana. After studying Ethnology and the History of Art at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana he has graduated from the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design where he has also completed his postgraduate studies. In the period 1994-1999 he was the chief editor of M’ARS magazine, the main magazine in the field of contemporary art. He is the founder and director of P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., a museum of contemporary Art. He has participated at numerous international exhibitions of contemporary art, e.g. the 10th Istanbul Biennial, San Francisco Art Institute, 49th Sao Paulo Art Biennial, 3rd Tirana Biennial, ZKM Karlsruhe, 49th Venice Biennial, the Stedelijk Museum, the Arte Carillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. For his works Tadej Pogačar has received several awards, including the Franklin Furnace Award in New York (2001), the »Trend« award for exceptional achievements in the field of visual art (2008) and the leading national “Jakopič Award” for fine arts (2009).
Since 1997 World of Art, the School for Curators and Critics of Contemporary Art has been establishing a wholesome and internationally conceived infrastructural system of education for young curators, critics, theoreticians and researchers of contemporary art. The Curatorial course – as one of the school segments – on a long-term and systematically establishes a platform for the understanding of contemporary art, teaches young, future curators, organizers, theoreticians, critics etc. the knowledge and skilfulness for expert functioning in the world of contemporary art. The programme consists of lectures, seminars, workshops, research work, and modules about curator’s practical work, study excursions and gallery practice. The process is composed of event organization, studio visits, meetings with curators, artists, theoreticians and writers as well as group work at conceptualization and the execution of the exhibition of contemporary art under tutorship.
School leader: Saša Nabergoj
School coordinator: Sonja Zavrtanik