EXHIBITING IN SLOVENIA: A SYMPOSIUM UPON THE 110TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JAKOPIČ PAVILION

We have recently celebrated a few respectable anniversaries of Slovenian art institutions. In 2017, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec celebrated its 60th anniversary. In 2018, we marked the centennial of the National Gallery of Slovenia and the 70th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. This year we are celebrating 65 years of the Maribor Art Gallery, 45 years of Božidar Jakac Art Museum in Kostanjevica na Krki, and the 110th anniversary of the opening of the Jakopič Pavilion, the first venue built expressly for the exhibition of art in Slovenia.

These important anniversaries are a good reason not only for celebration, but also for a more in-depth reflection on our over 100 years of practice in regularly exhibiting art, architecture, and design. The good response of the speakers and the variety of content related to exhibiting, recently researched and placed into an international context, prove the topicality of the symposium’s theme.

We open the symposium with the art societies that, in the middle of the 19th century, were the first to introduce in Slovene lands a more regular exhibiting of contemporaneous art. Further selected exhibitions, exhibition programmes, institutions, and other phenomena related to exhibiting are discussed and evaluated in a chronological order and from a variety of perspectives. A large share of the contributions reflect on the more lasting thematic, programmatic, geographic, or political orientations of the institutions, which have proven to be important, even decisive actors in directing and shaping our art field. We focus also on research on the accelerated institutionalisation of art, architecture, and design after World War II, and into how and why the wave of cyclic, especially biennial events occurred soon after. The symposium concludes with analyses of contemporary curatorial practices, new exhibition formats, and also new forms of institutions characteristic of recent decades. 
  
In addition to the delineated new knowledge, the symposium offers introspection and attempts to clarify those effects of our activity that are harder to trace. The desire for a more in-depth understanding of both the exhibition medium itself and the inner logic and workings of the Slovenian art system surface in reflections on how and why a certain approach to exhibiting appears and establishes itself, what its relation to the exhibited objects and art in general is, and how it intertwines with political and other non-art discourses and aspirations.

THURSDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2019

10.00 Welcome by Blaž Peršin, director of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGLM), and Andreja Hribernik (KGLU), representative of the organising committee
 

Exhibitions in Slovenia before World War II
Chair: Beti Žerovc

10.10 Miha Valant: The Exhibition Activity of the Affiliate of the Austrian Art Association in Ljubljana (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.30 Renata Komić Marn: “As a Culturo-Historical Phenomenon, the Portrait is Practically Inexhaustible.” Portraits, Their Owners and Researchers in Light of the Exhibition of Portrait Painting in Slovenia (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.50 Maruša Dražil: Exhibitions at the Kos Salon and the Obersnel Gallery in the 1930s and 40s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11.10 Anja Iskra: Exhibiting During the Nazi Occupation. The Exhibition of Artists from Lower Styria in Maribor in September 1943 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11.30 Panel discussion

Cultural Politics and Exhibitions in Socialist Yugoslavia
Chair: Asta Vrečko

12.10 Katarina Mohar: The Exhibition of Soviet Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in 1947 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.30 Lovorka Magaš Bilandžić, Patricia Počanić: Exhibition Stan za naše prilike, Housing Development and Modern Living in Yugoslavia in the 1950s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.50 Teja Merhar: Yugoslavia’s International Cultural Cooperation with the Member States of the Non-Aligned Movement

14.30 Gregor Dražil: The US at the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
14.50 Megan C. McShane: Exhibiting OHO. David Nez’s Conceptual Work as Shown in Experimentally Significant Slovenian Exhibition Designs from 1969 (video of the lecture)
15.10 Ana Ereš: Exhibiting New Artistic Practices Abroad. The Case of 1976 Yugoslav Exhibition at the Venice Biennale
15.30 Panel discussion

Exhibitions of Architecture and Design
Chair: Martina Malešič

16.20 Cvetka Požar: The Exhibiting of Graphic Design in the 20th Century in Slovenia with an Emphasis on Poster Exhibitions (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16.40 Maja Vardjan: A Design Exhibition as a Catalyst of Change – The Ljubljana Biennial of Design (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17.00 Nika Grabar: The Architecture of Open Houses (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17.20 Panel discussion

FRIDAY, 6 DECEMBER 2019

Exhibitions and Exhibition Programmes in the 1970s and 80s
Chair: Katarina Mohar

9.30 Asta Vrečko: The 1979 Exhibition Slovenian Fine Art 1945–1978 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
9.50 Tina Fortič Jakopič: Art Exhibitions in Sales Galleries. The Cases of Ars Gallery and the Labirint Gallery (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.10 Andreja Hribernik: Exhibitions under the Auspices of the United Nations at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.30 Vasja Nagy-Hofbauer: Photography in the Piran Coastal Galleries (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
10.50 Panel discussion
 

Periodic Exhibitions
Chair: Andreja Hribernik

11.30 Meta Kordiš: The International Triennial of Ecology and Art – EKO (1980–2005–2020), Maribor (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
11.50 Živa Brglez, Tjaša Pogačar: Festival as a Form of Exhibiting Intermedia Art. The Case of the International Festival of Computer Art in the Second Half of the 1990s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.10 Hana Ostan Ožbolt: Triennial of Contemporary (Slovene) Art – U3. Its Formation and the Change in Direction between the First and Second Editions in 1997 (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
12.30 Panel discussion
 

Exhibitions and Networking
Chair: Urška Jurman

14.00 Petja Grafenauer, Nataša Ivanović: Exhibition Design – Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
14.20 Tihana Puc: Exhibiting in Slovenia. Exhibition Networks of Contemporary Artists from Croatia
14.40 Miha Kelemina: "Let Your Programme Make Mistakes, Otherwise It Will Turn into a Hamburger". The Influence of the SCCA Network and the Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana on Exhibiting in Slovenia in the 1990s (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
15.00 Panel discussion
 

Exhibition as a Medium
Chair: Alenka Gregorič

16.00 Kaja Kraner: The Repositioning of National Art? The Exhibiting of the National and the International Collection of the Ljubljana's Museum of Modern Art from the 1990s Onward (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16.20 Domen Ograjenšek: The Epistemology of a Thematic Group Exhibition (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
16.40 Alenka Pirman: Implants (video of the lecture in Slovenian)
17.00 Panel discussion

Venue: City Museum of Ljubljana, Gosposka 15, Ljubljana

The symposium is being organised in cooperation with the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška and Božidar Jakac Art Museum, and supported by ERSTE Foundation.