The exhibition presents a new body of work by five younger-generation Slovenian artists. In recent articulations of their practices, they have worked within the contexts of site-specific art, spatial intervention, digital expansion, simulation, and other forms of virtuality. The conceptual framework of the exhibition centres on the question of how transposing these practices into the seemingly neutral gallery space shapes the conditions of their reception and experience. The curator assumes a dual role in the project – not as an external mediator, but as an active participant in the artistic process. Thus, the exhibition is not conceived as a selection of pre-existing or commissioned works, but as a structuring of initial relations and conditions.
The focus is on the emergence of artworks – not in terms of modernist concepts of authorship or contemporary artistic critiques of production conditions, but in how works respond to their material and medial circumstances. When placed in the gallery space, these conditions are nullified or neutralised; in response, the works begin to react to even the slightest deviations in the perception of the gallery’s neutrality. The rationale for such a “transposition” is evident in the very characteristics of the selected practices, which operate in an almost biological state. They are defined by notions such as infection, evolution, permeability, emergence, succession and mimicry. Like a jolt, every deviation from the ideal model triggers activity: the works probe the ground beneath them, determine trajectories of movement, shield themselves from the exterior, demarcate their space, and saturate the surrounding atmosphere.
The collective conception of the exhibition is therefore presented not as a social ecosystem but as a material one – as a “field of material agency”. Curation becomes an experiment in a Petri dish: the establishment of conditions and parameters that enable further development.
Vid Koprivšek