Peter Koštrun
The author places his own decision to withdraw to the outskirts into his relationship with the world and keeps returning to his authorial treatment of various peripherals, physical or mental. Even though his works, because of their motifs, often pass into the realm of the sublime, they nevertheless very realistically discuss nature, which has, even after all the interventions during the anthropocene era, managed to withhold and survive.
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Although the interpretations of Koštrun’s works and his entire opus are undeniably multifaceted and open to different interpretations and readings, the article suggests that all his word does share a common meditative stillness and sense of solitariness. Peter Koštrun’s opus lingers on the intersection of pristine nature and cultural landscape, on the intersection of the impact of humans on the environment and the insignificance of the individual in relation to nature. Even if Koštrun’s photographic motifs allude to archaism and romanticism, and are at first glance connected to the tradition of photographic pictorialism, they are in their essence distinctly modern, attached to the reality of the here and now. His expression is completely non-narrative in the classic sense of photographic representation, as the images do not tell a linear story, but are dedicated to visual language, which is (as opposed to the written word) always ambivalent and layered.
- Keywords: Anthropocene, landscape, melancholy, mortality, nature photography
Miha Colner (born 1978) has graduated from Art History and works as a freelance curator and art critic. Colner works as a curator and programme coordinator at the International Centre of Graphic Arts / Svicarija Creative Centre in Ljubljana. He is also active as a publicist, specialised in photography, printmaking, artists’ moving image and various forms of (new) media art. In the period 2006-2016 he was a curator at Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography, Ljubljana. Since 2005 he has been a contributor of newspapers, magazines, specialist publications, and his personal blog, as well as part-time lecturer. In 2006, he became a member of the project group Station DIVA at the SCCA Institute in Ljubljana, which is creating an archive and conducts research on Slovenian video art. In 2007, he co-curated and co-organized Break 2.4 festival, held biannually by K6/4 Institute. Since 2005, he has also worked as an art critic and a regular member of the cultural department at Radio Študent – he is an editor of the show on contemporary art Art-Area. He is also a regular external contributor to the daily newspaper Dnevnik and to the magazines Fotografija and Art-Words. He occasionally contributes to other specialist magazines on fine art and music, such as Maska, Forum, Časopis za kritiko znanosti, Flash, Folio, Zarez, Art Kontura, Frakcija (Croatia), Foto dokumenti (Serbia), Flaneur, Cluster (Great Britain), and Sculpture Network (USA).
He lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Peter Koštrun (1979, Ljubljana, Slovenia) graduated from Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he currently teaches at the Department of Photography. He has been exhibiting at home as well as abroad since 2003. Koštrun is a master of landscape photography known for his depiction of empty and deserted landscapes as well as his refined selection of framing and light. He is less interested in the documentary dimension of the land as he approaches the genre conceptually. His works contain a subtle atmosphere that evokes a feeling of something greateror even immortal. He lives and works in Brnica near Celje. Recent solo exhibitions include Moments, Mottard & Jenray, Liège (2012) in Belgium; The Time is Now, Photo Gallery Lang, Samobor in Crotatia (2012), Singularity, Photon Gallery in Vienna, Austra (2014) and Premonition, Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, Slovenia (2016). Koštrun has shown his work in many group exhibitions at home and abroad, including Almost Spring, 100 Years of Slovene Art at the Maribor Art Gallery (2012), as well as in one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography, Sense of Place at the Bozar Expo in Brussels (2012), and the exhibition Land / City / Real / Imagined at Diemar / Noble Gallery in London (2011). His most recent exhibitions are After all, Cellar Gallery, Kraków, Poland (2016) and Premonition, Photon Gallery Vienna, Austria (2019). Koštrun’s works can be found in the Essl collection in Vienna and in the collection of the Cabinet of Slovenian Photography in the Museum of Gorenjska in Kranj.
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You can lose a photograph by overthinking about its source.
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In August 2015, photographers Peter Rauch and Peter Koštrun took up the roles of curators at the Celje FOKUS Festival. At the exhibition, which they named Sondiranje (Probing), they compiled a collection of photographs of foreign, anonymous and unknown authors. The collection consists of artifacts collected by the authors in their archives over the years and was, upon receiving the invitation to participate, selected on the basis of their fascination with these artifacts. At one point in time, all the photos served their particular functions: advertising, family, propaganda, artistic expression, etc. The authors highlighted the alternative possibilities for interpreting such images, which may have, due to the time that has elapsed, been exempt from the first context because of the past time, perhaps due to the lack of signatures or the manner of presentation. Their assumption was that engaging viewers would break up the long, uniquely justified ways of understanding photographic material. Visiting authors and collectors were also invited to participate.
- Keywords: alternative possibilities, anonymous author, archive, collection, context, probing
Nataša Ilec Kralj (1992) earned her MA at Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in the field of photography and her BA at VIST Ljubljana – Department of photography. She takes interest in theoretical and philosophical aspects of the photographic medium and has also participated in a few group exhibitions (πr2 – contemporary cinetic ceramics: Layerjeva hiša, Kranj, 2021; Cyanotypical: Ljubljana, 2019; Svaka čast: Ljubljana, 2019; Create a work which is not yours: Ljubljana, 2019; FUGA – UL ALUO+FA: Ljubljana, 2019; Stičišče: Ljubljana, 2019; 25 Images: Berlin, 2017; ISO0: Photonic Moments, Ljubljana, 2016; Flâneur: Ljubljana, 2015; Overlook: Photonic Moments, Ljubljana, 2014; NovaF: Maribor, 2013). Ilec Kralj curated her first exhibition, Mejniki, in 2017. She has been collaborating, contributing and translating for Membrana since 2017. Her free time passion is bookbinding.
Peter Koštrun (1979, Ljubljana, Slovenia) graduated from Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he currently teaches at the Department of Photography. He has been exhibiting at home as well as abroad since 2003. Koštrun is a master of landscape photography known for his depiction of empty and deserted landscapes as well as his refined selection of framing and light. He is less interested in the documentary dimension of the land as he approaches the genre conceptually. His works contain a subtle atmosphere that evokes a feeling of something greateror even immortal. He lives and works in Brnica near Celje. Recent solo exhibitions include Moments, Mottard & Jenray, Liège (2012) in Belgium; The Time is Now, Photo Gallery Lang, Samobor in Crotatia (2012), Singularity, Photon Gallery in Vienna, Austra (2014) and Premonition, Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, Slovenia (2016). Koštrun has shown his work in many group exhibitions at home and abroad, including Almost Spring, 100 Years of Slovene Art at the Maribor Art Gallery (2012), as well as in one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography, Sense of Place at the Bozar Expo in Brussels (2012), and the exhibition Land / City / Real / Imagined at Diemar / Noble Gallery in London (2011). His most recent exhibitions are After all, Cellar Gallery, Kraków, Poland (2016) and Premonition, Photon Gallery Vienna, Austria (2019). Koštrun’s works can be found in the Essl collection in Vienna and in the collection of the Cabinet of Slovenian Photography in the Museum of Gorenjska in Kranj.
Peter Rauch (1979) is an architect, photographer and lecturer. In his creative practice he dissects matter of various buildings and insists on the opposition between a document and a construction of an artwork. In his theoretical practice he deals with the origin of thought, the role of negation in the constitution of an object, and the issue of rupture in the fields of art, science, and politics. He is an assistant professor at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design and at The Photography Department at The Higher School of Applied Sciences in Ljubljana.
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