Events

“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

5. Reciklart – Art Festival of Recycling and DIY Culture will take place at AKC Metelkova, at the Square Without Historical Remembrance (platform in front of the Alkatraz Gallery), unless otherwise stated.

In case of rain, the program will take place at Alkatraz Gallery, AKC Metelkova.

Check the entire program on the Facebook!

Preparations of the 5. Art Festival of Recycling and DIY Culture Reciklart – which will be held on 6-10  August – are in full speed, therefore we invite you all to join us in co-creating the festival!

If you are interested in topics like recycling, DIY-creativity, art in all forms, alternatives to consumer culture and the exploitative attitude towards nature and people, and you want to gain some new experience, knowledge, skills and acquaintances, email us at festival.reciklart@gmail.com (subject: “VOLUNTARY”). The call is open until 17 June.

In the application, please specify which of the following areas you are interested in:

– manual printing of advertising material
– help with the festival stand
– preparing space for workshops
– public relations (PR)
– decorating the festival space
– organization and coordination of the program
– Documentation of the festival program (video, photo)
– translation (from Slovenian to English)
– help with food preparation

We are looking forward to hang out, create, recycle, reflect, cook, play and contemplate with you!

Organization: KUD Mreža / Reciklart
Co-ordination: KUD Mreža / Alkatraz Gallery

The project is co-financed by Municipality of Ljubljana,  Department for Culture – Youth Office.

This year’s focus of the festival is on exploration and comprehension of different aspects of borders, be those physical, optical, social, psychologic or purely spiritual, borders that both divide and connect. We will thus put on display works that explore the boundaries between the public and the private, between past and present etc. works that examine the limits of human perception and imagination and thus offer a deliberation on this phenomenon which is attracting lots of attention due to current events in the world.

One of the Festivals’ stations is Alkatraz Gallery, where RaumZeitPiraten – German art collective, will present a solo exhibition.  RaumZeitPiraten is a collective of German artists who create characteristic »techno« light installations, mobile and kinetic DIY sculptures made from repurposed opto-acoustic devices.  The collective this time occupies the whole gallery presenting a project that stems from the historical concept of the so-called Expanded Cinema from the 70’s. This, unlike classical movie production, combines movies with other technological means such as video, special effects, holograms etc. RaumZeitPiraten are presenting an ironic paraphrase of the Expanded Cinema: the viewer, immersed in a visually saturated space conglomerate turns into an active participant of this meta-narrative and multi-sensorial ’cinematic’ story.

At the opening of the exhibition, there will be a repeat of analogue screenings in front of the Alkatraz Gallery called Overhead  – project by students of High School of Design and Photography. These are analogue improvisations using overhead projectors where the attendees will demonstrate their creative skills in creating live visual narratives.

RaumZeitPiraten is an audio-visual, time and space changing art collective that consists of Tobias Daemgen, Jan Ehlen and Moritz Ellerich. They have been working together since 2007 under this name that hints at the inspirational Einstein’s concept of the four-dimensional Raumzeit (space-time), while as pirates they feel the need to freely play with these concepts outside the traditional frameworks of production.

You are kindly invited to the opening of “About the Impossibility of Borders” exhibition by RaumZeitPiraten art collective on 23 May, Thursday at 9.30 pm at Alkatraz Gallery. The exhibition is a part of the 13th International Festival of Lighting Guerrilla.

Production: Strip Core/Forum Ljubljana & High School of Design and Photography (screenings).
Co-production: Alkatraz Gallery/KUD Mreža

On display: 23 May 2019 – 15 June 2019

12. V:NM Festival premieres Tea Grahek’s debut music documentary Improcon – Heartful of Music on the opening day of the Austrian festival presenting improvised music on 29 May in Graz. The screening is taking place at Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus at 2 pm, followed by afternoon and evening concerts at Esc Medien Kunst Labor, Forum Stadtpark and Stockwerkjazz with Nina Polaschegg and Judith Unterpertinger; the trio of Lotte Anker, Elisabeth Harnik and Reinhard Ziegerhofer; Annette Giesriegl, Alfred Lang, Werner Zangerle and Patrick Wurzwallner – among many others.

The film had two work-in-progress pre-premieres previously at Improcon 2018 – Graz Edition last May, and at Improcon 2018 – 4th Congress Of Free Improvised Music, Arts & Thoughts in August at Veliki Tabor Castle in Desinić, Croatia, but since then the documentary reached its final form, got completed with English subtitles and ready to meet the reactions of the jury and audience at various regional film festivals and later worldwide. After the V:NM Festival premiere, Tea Grahek’s work will be applied to Dok’n’Ritam Festival in Serbia, DORF Film Festival in Croatia, DOKUDOC in Slovenia, Mediawave in Hungary, and later this year will be screened in Australia. We have briefly talked with Tea Grahek about her documentary debut.

“The project was definitely a learning process, I can even call it a playground with lots of experiments: how to make a video documentation on such a huge event with minimal equipment. It was also a privilage to meet, work with, listen to and film so many great artists from different parts of the world. The first idea was to make a short fundraising campaign clip for the festival, but after collecting all recorded materials on more than 40 different sessions, 14 interviews with participting artists, plus all the cutaway shots, I realized that the end result will be defintely much bigger and much more complex than just a short clip that calls out for crowdfunding”, explains Tea Grahek.

“The whole idea of Improcon, the participating artists, filming and later the post-production influenced and inspired me how to make a documentary about improvisation. By improvisation. Everything that doesn’t really vibrate to you, is useless. Even though the picture looks nice or the music sounds great, if it doesn’t serve the final result, should not be used. However painful it is, most of the material won’t make it to the final version of the movie”, says the filmmaker.

The 52-minute film is an intimate and documentary-style visual story on Improcon 2017, about improvised music in general, and a certain vision of free-thinking. It features interviews and ad-hoc sessions by the festival’s participating artists. In 2017 the workshop festival hosted more than 70 artists from 18 countries, and had been organized by Slovenian associations KUD Mreža from Ljubljana and Klub Metulj – Youth Centre Bistrica ob Sotli from Bistrica ob Sotli with Croatian association Gokul from Zabok, partnered by two Austrian organizations: Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus from Graz, and Šopron Shuffle – Trans European Music Meetings from Vienna.

Improcon – Heartful of Music has a 30-second teaser trailer out today which will be followed by a second teaser trailer in two weeks. The short teasers will be followed by a longer trailer in late-April.