Events

“Group exhibition Bad Choice? / Slaba odločitev? is part of a long-term research project, which will be implemented in the form of presentations, exhibitions, interviews and analyses. The project was established with the aim of detecting the conditions of work of art collectives in the field of art and presenting the problems and challenges they face in their work. Through the presentation of the process of work and the direct testimony in the form of an interview, the visitor will receive an insight into their creative work, how they operate and the reflections of the artists on the collectivity. We invited three tandems to this year’s exhibition. These are Lenka Đorojević & Matej Stupica, Nika Oblak & Primož Novak and Small but Dangers.” – galerijalkatraz.org

Thanks to: Center for Contemporary Arts SCCA-Ljubljana and Forum Ljubljana for borrowing equipment for the exhibition.

Additional programme: artist talk & guided tour, Friday, 13th April, at 7 pm.

Lenka Đorojević & Matej Stupica is an artistic duo based in Ljubljana, working together since 2012. With their collaborations, they develop a body of works that oscillate between interactive installation ambiences, set designs and experiential environments. As an artistic duo, they have been presenting their work at: National Library of Serbia in Belgrade and International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (2012), MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art in Ljubljana (2014), P74 Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana (2015), 8th Triennial of Contemporary Art – U3, Beyond the Globe at the Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana, Galerija Jakopič and P74 Gallery in Ljubljana and RU – Residency Unlimited in New York (2016), Venice International Performance Art Week and A plus A Gallery in Venice, U10 Art Space Belgrade (2017). For their work they received OHO Award 2015. / matejstupica.net, djlenka.wordpress.com

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak examine contemporary media and capital driven society as they dissect its visual and linguistic structure. They exhibited worldwide, in venues like the Sharjah Biennial (AE), Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo (JP), Istanbul Biennial (TR), Biennale Cuvee in Linz (AT), Transmediale in Berlin (DE), FILE in Sao Paulo (BR). They received numerous grants and awards, including the CYNETART Award by the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau in Dresden (DE) and an honorary mention of art critics at the Biennale WRO, Wroclaw (PL). In 2018 they were awarded the White Aphroid Award for artistic achievement by MMC KIBLA, Maribor (SI). / oblak-novak.org

Small but Dangers (Mateja Rojc & Simon Hudolin Salči), born 1977. They began to work together under the common name Small but Dangers in 2004, with exhibition Process in C.M.A.K. Youth Center Cerkno. They are represented by Gallery P74 since 2010. / smallbutdangers.cerkno.net

You are kindly invited to the opening of group exhibition Bad Choice? on 6 April, Friday at 8 pm at Alkatraz Gallery. Make sure to join us also for the artist talk and guided tour on 13 April, Friday at 7 pm.

On display: 6 April 2018 – 26 April 2018

Duo Minton / Hübsch will present the Metal Breath debut, which will be released shortly before the concert by the Inexhaustible Editions (Ljubljana).

As part of the international project Borderless Dissonance, the new trio by Réka Kutas, Gašper Livk and Jakob Gnigler will be followed.

Phil Minton – voice / Carl Ludwig Hübsch – tuba
Borderless Dissonance # 1: Jakob Gnigler – saxophone / Rék Kutas – cello / Gašper Livk – double bass

You are kindly invited on 8 March 2018 at 20.00 to Klub Gromka!

Photo: Jože Balas

When I was born, I had no name, surname, nationality, citizenship, gender! I am still that one that was before! Am I!? Unseen wounds cracked my inner skin. Borders paralyzed my wishes.  (Qëndresë Deda, excerpt from Monologue, Dialogue, Trialogue)

“What Are The Words Doing? is the title of the exhibition and performance by Qëndresë Deda, an artist from Kosovo that currently lives and studies in Ljubljana. In her work, she usually combines different media, from photography, drawings, writing and design, to video, and often puts herself in a role of an object and a subject simultaneously. Although her works appear to be very personal, intimate even, she deals with the phenomena of her immediate surroundings, as she describes it.

Her new work, about to be presented at the 19th International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns, is intertwined with her own personal writings, poetry and graffiti, in which she asks questions concerning identity, freedom and restrictions that are imposed on people in present-day society. Thoughts, sentences and words will appear on the windows of the Gallery at the start of the performance. The artwork will be transformed by the actions of the artist and other performers, who will co-create the meanings, using their bodies and voices. What there will be left afterwards is an echo of past actions, but also an artwork in itself.

The spoken words will fade away, leaving only the written ones. Just like the words we say aloud cease to exist in a form of a sound after spoken (if not recorded), but find ways to leave an impact in realms of invisible; in the minds of listeners. That is why Qëndresë Deda describes the work as sound utopia of a real space inside and outside oneself.

This corresponds with the specific situation of the Night Window Display Gallery Pešak, where one can observe exhibitions only from the outside, while the artworks are closed inside the building. The artist plays between the private, intimate realm of thoughts and public, outer world, situating words on the glass of the window, and creating a link between the two.” – Anabel Černohorski

Qëndresë Deda (1988, Pristina) graduated from Graphic Design at the University of Pristina. Her works have been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Pristina (L’Espace Culturel Francais; Tetris – Space for Manipulation; Traffic Gallery, Stacion – Centre for Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Kosovo). In 2014, she had an exhibition at KC Tobačna 001 in Ljubljana, where she was a residence artist. In 2015, she had an exhibition at Villa Romana, Florence, also a part of artist-in-residence program. In the same year, her works were part of the 31^st Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. She is a two-time finalist of the Artists of tomorrow Award (Stacion – Centre for Contemporary Art, Pristina). Currently, she is a student at the University of Ljubljana, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design – Department of Video and New media.

You are kindly invited to the opening performance on 3 March, Saturday at 7.30 pm at Gallery Night Display Pešak.

The fifth season of concert series Metabonma for classical composed music is starting with a solo performance of the multiple prestigious award-winner German percussionist Vanessa Porter at Klub Gromka on 6 February, Tuesday at 8 pm.

Vanessa Porter (1992, Laupheim, Germany) has been the finalist of the World Marimba Competition (Stuttgart, 2012), one of the recipients of the German national scholarship, and the winner of the Young German Musicians’ Competition, after she received the title of national young musician. In 2016 Porter won the first prize and audience’s prize at the August-Everding competition in Munich.

As a soloist in chamber music she has collaborated with the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Young Euro Classics. She has performed with the Stuttgart Philharmonie Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra Ludwigsburg, Ulm Chamber Orchestra and the Südwind Wind Orchestra.

With her percussion quartet Daidalos she has received the first prize and special prize for the best performance of compulsory songs at the International Percussion Competition in Luxembourg in 2015. In February 2015 the quartet received the Bruno-Frey Prize which enabled the recording and the release of their first album with the music of Cage, Donatoni and Langui.

Together with her sister Jessica Porter, she received a prize at the online competition in Italy and the sponsorship of the Karl-Jegg Foundation at MIZ (Deutsches Musikinformationzentrum). She is currently a postgraduate student at the High School Of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart where she studied with Marta Klimasaro and Jürgen Spitschka. She also studied in London at the Royal Music Academy.

6 February 2018, Tuesday 20.00 – Klub Gromka, Ljubljana

“Erik Mavrič is qualified painter who does not appear very frequently in the public artistic space, however, when he does, he usually puts on display an ouvre of monument qualities. He proved this already at his first larger solo exhibition at Krško Gallery, where he – under the joint title Who Is Stingy with Words, Lacks Bread… / Kdor besede špara, kruha strada… (2014) – presented a couple of monumental artworks. In the first one, entitled Garbage Bible, he copied the entire text of the Bible, in excerpts, onto the packaging left over from his daily shopping. In the second, entitled Golden Bread / Zlati kruh, he dried and gilded about 400 kilos of bread. Another artwork that belongs within this frame is Erik’s Room / Erikova soba in the Hiša kulture (House Of Culture), in Pivka (2017), a permanent wall painting that came about in the way that the artist covered all the walls of a smaller gallery space entirely with a crayon, as a »seismograph« of visual noting of activities, taking place in this particular space.

What all the mentioned artworks have in common and what connects them with his most recent one, introduced in the present exhibition, is – in its very basis – a simple, yet long-running, monotonous and repetitious routine of its creation. The artist was producing each of these works for several months or even years, several hours a day, using commonplace materials and tools of broad coverage. To sum it up, the artist closely bound his production with his everyday surroundings and ordinary daily life.

In the present exhibition he is presenting a monumental work entitled The Sky On Earth / Nebo na zemlji in which he undertook the task of diagram-transferring of the night sky on newspaper paper with a ball-pen. The image entitled The visible stars by distance, by the Black Oak observatory in California, USA, available on the internet, served as the outset for his artwork The image shows a data model of the universe, visible to the naked eye, representing only a fragment of all the stars that have been detected by telescopes. The image is divided horizontally and vertically into 475 parts. The artist was drawing diagrams of singular segments onto the pages of daily papers, enlarged in the 1:10 ratio. The fragmentariness and the process of enlarging enabled him to transform the copying into a kind of a daily dairy entry, the process that he persistently continued for long 17 months, 7 hours per day, on average. The final product of the process is the approximately 50 square metres (5,073 m x 9,750 m) big puzzle-like drawing, depicting the star-covered sky, spreading out over the written record of topical events on Earth, as well as the artist’s visual diary from the period.” – galerijalkatraz.org

Erik Mavrič (1979, Koper) graduated in painting in 2004 and in 2008 obtained his M.A. at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. His works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, among them at the House of Culture/Hiša kulture, Pivka, 2016; Galerija Dimenzija napredka, Nova Gorica, 2014; Galerija Krško, 2014; Project Room SCCA / Projektna soba SCCA, Ljubljana, 2012. Mavrič had participated at several group exhibitions in such venues as: P74, Ljubljana, Hiša kulture Pivka, Centre for Contemporary Arts/Center sodobnih umetnosti Celje, Galerija Velenje, City Gallery/Mestna galerija Nova Gorica, Galerija Simulaker, Novo mesto, Galerija Insula, Izola. In 2012 he was awarded a special acknowledgement of the expert jury at the 16th Slovene Sculpture Exhibition, and in 2002 he received a Prešeren Award for students.

You are kindly invited to the exhibition opening of The Sky On Earth by Erik Mavrič, curated by Mojca Grmek. The opening will take place on 6 February at 8 pm at Alkatraz Gallery in Ljubljana.

On display: 6 February 2018 – 2 March 2018