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It struck me how transiency (and even the thought of a possible failure) of a political idea on occasion seems more comic and more tragic that the inherent transiency of a human life.
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Foundation of Endeavour centres on Jasmina Cibic’s ongoing investigation into the idea of political gifts of culture, exploring their role within national and political structures during moments of European crisis in the 20th century. The exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana (MSUM), curated by Igor Španjol, comprises several of Cibic’s recent works: All the Power that Melts into Noise, Foundation of Endeavour, The Spirit of Our Needs, and the 20’ art film project The Gift. The author argues that the multipartite exhibition succeeds in conveying often overlooked manifestations of “soft power” formidably well, thus shedding light onto the historical, anthropological and sociological facets of political gifts and also suggesting relevant considerations on the significance of notions such as “public art”, “internationalism”, and “national culture”.
Jaka Gerčar (b. 1995, Ljubljana) is a PhD candidate at the University of Ljubljana. His current research interests concentrate on reading practices in the humanities, publishing, and the social ramifications of digitisation. He also contributes essays and pieces of criticism in subjects such as philosophy, literature, and art. He is the head of publishing for Membrana Institute, Ljubjana and serves as the managing editor of the Dutch journal Depth of Field (Leiden University Press).
Jasmina Cibic (b. 1979, Ljubljana) is a London based artist who works in performance, installation and film, employing a range of activity, media and theatrical tactics to redefine or reconsider a specific ideological formation and its framing devices such as art and architecture. Her work draws a parallel between the construction of national culture and its use value for political aims, addressing the timelessness of psychological and soft power mechanisms that authoritarian structures utilise in their own reinsertion and reinvention. Jasmina Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial with her project “For Our Economy and Culture”. She has been shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2018) and was the winner of the MAC International Ulster Bank and Charlottenborg Fonden awards (2016). As of November 2020, her upcoming solo shows include macLyon, Muzeum Sztuki Łódź and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Cibic’s recent monograph Spielraum is published by BALTIC and Distanz and NADA by Kerber Verlag and Kunstmuseen Krefeld.
http://jasminacibic.org/
- Hobsbawm, E. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mauss, M. 2002. The Gift. London: Routledge.
- Nye, J. 2009. Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics. London: Hachette.
Tito’s relaxed manner towards the camera can also be seen as frank admission of the ruling regime that the photographs are indeed made and constructed rather than being a neutral documentation of reality.
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Among older generations within the territory of former Yugoslavia, May 25th is still remembered as Youth Day; the holiday that once marked the birthday of the federation’s life-long leader, Marshal Tito. An exhibition of Tito as a photographer by his personal photographer Joco Žnidaršič opened on May 25th, 2020 at Galerija Fotografija in Ljubljana – incidentally, just a few kilometres away from the hospital where Tito had died exactly four decades ago on May 4, 1980.
Jaka Gerčar (b. 1995, Ljubljana) is a PhD candidate at the University of Ljubljana. His current research interests concentrate on reading practices in the humanities, publishing, and the social ramifications of digitisation. He also contributes essays and pieces of criticism in subjects such as philosophy, literature, and art. He is the head of publishing for Membrana Institute, Ljubjana and serves as the managing editor of the Dutch journal Depth of Field (Leiden University Press).
Joco Žnidaršič (b. 1938) is a Slovenian photographer. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Ljubljana in 1963. During his studies he took up press and art photography to which he devoted himself fully in subsequent years. As a press photographer he worked for publications Študentska tribuna and Tovariš, and was the editor of photography for the Delo daily newspaper from 1974 until his retirement. Beside his work as a press photographer he published numerous photo monographs that were praised by the critics and have earned him a reputation as one of the most prominent Slovene press and art photographers. He is the receiver of more than 50 domestic and international awards including World Press Photo Award, the Prešeren Fund Award and the Župančič Award. He received the Puhar Award for lifetime achievement and Consortium Veritatis Award for lifetime achievement in journalism in Slovenia. In 2009, the President of the Republic of Slovenia Danilo Türk conferred on him the Golden Order for Services for lifetime achievement in the area of photography and for valuable contribution to Slovenia s visibility. In 2013, the President Borut Pahor decorated him with the Order of Merit for his participation in the project Slovenia My Country.
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To be honest, I am shy and people frightened me. Animals only pooped on your shoes.
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Macinnis’ photographs of various groups of animals are so striking because all the animals assembled in front of the camera seem to be most willing to accept the camera’s gaze and the power relation implied. Animals are usually hard to photograph, because they are not particularly collaborative, unpredictable in their movements, and tend to flee the frame. Macinnis’ protagonists pose and look straight into the camera. They appear tame, pacified, ‘civil’, patiently awaiting their pictorial equivalent. As in all well-managed and representative group photos, there are no obvious signs of disorder or potential subversion. Macinnis’ patchwork families look friendly and demonstrate unity and a sense of aesthetic order. Macinnis’ photos allow for a reflection on group photographs and their specific arrangements. At the same time, they make one painfully aware of the disciplinary nature of the photographic act. Posing and freezing in front of the camera is a cultural practice that had to be trained and appropriated. Narratives from the beginnings of photography prove that. By looking at Macinnis’ fully disciplined animal models, one realizes how much of our own unruliness we had to give up to fit into the photographic system.
- Keywords: animal group portraits, anti-photographs, composite images, discipline
Monika Schwarzler is an Associate Professor at Webster Vienna Private University, Department of Media Communications; Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Vienna; graduate training at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna; taught at Webster University in St. Louis, MO and in the study abroad program of the University of Oregon; lectures at the International Summer and Winter School of the University of Vienna; founder and chair of the T.K. Lang Gallery at Webster University. Main fields of research: visual culture, art and media theory, history of photography, animation. Most recent publication: At Face Value and Beyond. Photographic Constructions of Reality, Transcript Verlag, 2016.
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Facial recognition technology, which seeks to identify the shape of the skull beneath the skin and tissue of the face, is based on the assumption that it can be anything that occurs on the surface of the face, a potential camouflage, while the bone structure underneath it is impossible or at least very difficult to transform.
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Facial recognition technology, which seeks to identify the shape of the skull beneath the skin and tissue of the face, is based on the assumption that it can be anything that occurs on the surface of the face, a potential camouflage, while the bone structure underneath it is impossible or at least very difficult to transform.
Jasna Jernejšek (born 1982) holds a BA in Cultural Studies and an MA in Media and Communication Studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Since 2012 she is an editor of radio programme on contemporary visual arts Art-Area at Radio Student. She is a regular contributor to Fotografija magazine. Since 2013 she collaborates as project manager and curator with gallery Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography and with festival Photonic Moments – Month of Photography. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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The usual practice of portraying the dead before cremation at Manikarnika Ghat becomes an indicator of the unusual and exotic Indian culture, and although taking posthumous portraits has a long and continuous tradition in the Western world, we seemed to have forgotten about this art form.
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The usual practice of portraying the dead before cremation at Manikarnika Ghat becomes an indicator of the unusual and exotic Indian culture, and although taking posthumous portraits has a long and continuous tradition in the Western world, we seemed to have forgotten about this art form.
Jasna Jernejšek (born 1982) holds a BA in Cultural Studies and an MA in Media and Communication Studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Since 2012 she is an editor of radio programme on contemporary visual arts Art-Area at Radio Student. She is a regular contributor to Fotografija magazine. Since 2013 she collaborates as project manager and curator with gallery Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography and with festival Photonic Moments – Month of Photography. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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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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