Barbara Borčić: A Catalogue. Editor’s View

World of Art | School for Curatorial Practices and Critical Writing | Year 16


Catalogue is a frequent and significant companion to the exhibition, festival, art and curatorial project etc. With a help of concrete examples of different types of catalogues will be observed, referring to group, survey, thematic and solo exhibitions as well as documentary or research projects. We will look over its role and function as well as its relation to the exhibition.
How to conceive and conceptualize a catalogue will follow, as regards its range, structure, form and content. The students will also get some practical hints to writing a good text and format it according to the guidelines for citations and bibliographies.


Barbara BorčićBarbara Borčić (1954)
Graduated with B.A. in art history from the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and studied PhD media studies and antropology, Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Postgraduate Faculty of Humanities, Ljubljana). Since 2000 director of SCCA−Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts. Active in the field of contemporary arts as a free-lance curator, publicist and editor. Member of AICA, International Association of Art Critics and IKT, International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art. In frame of SCCA Borčić conceived and edited the documentation, archival and research project on video art in Slovenia under the title Videodokument. Video Art in Slovenia 1969–1998. She is also curating video programs under the title Videospotting and writing about video (in English: ‘From Alternative Scene to Art Video’, in Reader V2_East Meeting, No. 1, Rotterdam, 1996; ‘Video Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism’, in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, MIT Press, Massachussetts, 2003). She was a leader of curated web project Internet Portfolio, research projects What Is to Be Done with the Balkan Art and What Is to Be Done with the Audiovisual Archives, and editor of PlatformaSCCA magazine. At the moment she is also a leader of No Nails, No Pedestals presentation/discussion program and of a physical and web archive of video art DIVA Station. From 1980 on she worked in Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana and was the artistic director of the gallery 1982–1985. Between 1982 and 1992 she was involved in video practice in frame of Ljubljana alternative scene and collaborated on several art and documentary video projects. 1991–1992 she was editor-in-chief of the fine arts magazine Likovne besede (Art Words). From 1993 she was an assistant to the director, from 1997 the director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana.