“For the 26th anniversary of Autonomous Cultural Centre Metelkova City (ACC Metelkova mesto), Arts and Culture Association Mreža (meaning ‘network) (KUD Mreža) connected with The Last Contemporary Art Museum, a worldly renowned institution, which is located in the settlement Logje, at the extreme west of Slovenia, in a building of venerable age.[1] The title of the museum stresses the fact that, nowadays, contemporary art has reached its edge. The museum stands in the middle of intact nature. With its activities, it questions the methodology, approaches and creations of contemporary art, which is a par excellence link with the versatile artist Damijan Kracina, who it exclusively represents. The museum also hosts the artist’s permanent and permanently changing exhibition. Damijan Kracina is an academic painter and multimedia artist. Since 2008 and until recently, he was using his artistic studio at Metelkova. In 2018, he applied for and won a studio place in Švicarija (meaning ‘Swiss/sweat) in Park Tivoli, Ljubljana. Despite this, Damijan Kracina is still very much present in Metelkova City, both with current projects he is executing or helping to conceptualise and with numerous placements in a public space, which leave a mark on Metelkova City.
In Alktraz Gallery, we regularly host retrospective exhibitions of Metelkova’s artists. For the 26th anniversary, we chose the exhibition of Damijan Kracina in order to mark the turning point in time, characterised by the leaving of this relevant artist from the working space. According to the agreement with The Last Contemporary Art Museum, we decided to follow a successful model of their permanent exhibition, and conceptualise our exhibition as a cabinet of curiosities. In fact, this principle is typical of the artist, who ‘constructs the cabinets of wonder anew again and again by including curiosities he runs into on his journey into his own mental landscape’, as Klavdija Figelj poetically contends at the opening of his exhibition, entitled Discomforting Meaning, on 8 June 2019 in Ciril Kosmač’s library in Tolmin, Slovenia.” – galerijalkatraz.org
Damijan Kracina (1970) completed his graduate studies in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art and Design (ALOU) in 1996, where he also obtained his MA in Sculpture and Video Art in 1999. He was improving his knowledge in Graz, Austria, New York, at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, and at Santa Fe Art Institute in the USA. He was a co-founding member of the art group Provokart and a co-founder and, for a while, artistic director of the centre for art ARTilerija Kluže. Moreover, he is a co-founder of the art group The Domestic Research Society (DDR). Since 2010, he has been working as a professor at the Secondary School for Design and Photography. In 2015, he established The Last Contemporary Art Museum in Logje. He lives and works in Ljubljana.
You are kindly invited to the opening of the retrospective exhibition The Remains by Damijan Kracina on 2 September, Monday at 8 pm, at Alkatraz Gallery, and kindly invited also to the guided tour with the artist (in Slovene language) on 7 September, Saturday at 6 pm.
On display: 2 September 2019 – 20 September 2019