Opening hours:
Monday - Friday:11am - 7pm
Monday - Friday:11am - 7pm
06 April 2018 > 26 April 2018 Kindly invited to the opening of group exhibition "Bad Choice?" on Friday, 6th April at 8 p.m. at Alkatraz Gallery, ACC Metelkova mesto. Make sure to join us also for artist talk & guided tour on Friday, 13th April, at 7 pm.
Look at our catalogue below or download it here.
Group exhibition "Bad Choice?" / “Slaba odločitev?” is part of a long-term research project, which will be implemented in the form of presentations, exhibitions, interviews and analyses. The project was established with the aim of detecting the conditions of work of art collectives in the field of art and presenting the problems and challenges they face in their work. Through the presentation of the process of work and the direct testimony in the form of an interview, the visitor will receive an insight into their creative work, how they operate and the reflections of the artists on the collectivity. We invited three tandems to this year's exhibition. These are Lenka Đorojević & Matej Stupica, Nika Oblak & Primož Novak and Small but Dangers.
Collective creative production in the Slovenian art field has a long history and has developed specific dynamics. The most recognizable is certainly collective action in the time of avant-garde artistic movements. The phenomenon of collective artistic creation can be traced in the most recognizable avant-garde groups; in the 1970s with the OHO group and in the 1980s with the internationally recognizable Neue Slowenische Kunst collective and the Irwin group. Today, too, we have several artistic connections, which are shown either as artistic duos or as a group.
In connection with this kind of artistic connection, issues such as: where is the boundary of joint action and where this independence is expressed, if present at all. We associate art with the identification of individual authorship as a paradigm of modern art. In today's corporate world, art defends the field of autonomy at a substantive level, and at the production level, collective production processes are often present. User does not ask whether artwork is produced by one, two or three artists. Contemporary art production is approaching the way of collective work, because the artists, who in the process of the execution of an artwork include other authors and various experts who come from other areas. This means that the process of work is collective and that art is assuming many social functions and is no longer the exclusive product of an expressive individual. All this should be seen as an opportunity to reflect on the advantages of such a mode of action. At the exhibition, the invited artistic duos will offer a critical view of systemic deficiencies in ensuring the conditions of work in the field of art, and a reflection on the mechanisms that could stimulate and facilitate this process.
In the interviews, artists emphasize the bitter-sweet position of operation within the tandem. From their reflections stems the title of the group exhibition. On the one hand, artistic duos work offers advantages such as work distribution, greater efficiency, compromise, tolerance, communication, etc. On the other hand, working in a artistic duo is an existentially "poor" decision. As the Small but Dangers say: “the final equation is simple: we are cheaper. The buyer gets the work of two for the price of one, for example, the exhibition fee for the solo exhibition of an artistic duo is the same as the exhibition for the individual exhibition of an individual artist. It pays off to work individually. The system promotes individual work by rewarding it more than collective work."
Group exhibition "Bad Choice?" plays with questions and reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of collective mode of operation. The nature of the artwork offers many opportunities, so the decisions are part of the mission; autonomously, in an artistic dou or in a collective. Today modern art intertwines different knowledge, experience, media and content, so collective work is part of a common process. Collectivity – also in artistic creativity – builds on tolerance, equivalence, communication and values that are immanent to society as such, but have, due to external pressures, broken down into a multitude of individualities. To work in the field of art is not a bad decision; it is part of an individual and defines her/him as a social being. The social construct, which is based on poor material conditions and the lack of understanding of the functioning of contemporary art however, perpetually places modern artists, artistic duos and collectives into the position of questioning their own role and value in society.
Jadranka Plut
