Transgressions: space, border, margin

Monday, March 2nd, 2020 | Exhibitions

Exhibition: Transgressions: space, border, margin
Venue: Mestna galerija Nova Gorica (Nova Gorica City Art Gallery), Bevkov trg 4, Nova Gorica
Date: 6 – 12 March, 4 – 29 May 2020

Artists: Nika Autor, Vesna Bukovec, Lana Čmajčanin, Dušan Fišer, Metod Frlic, Michael Kos, Jure Markota, Muhammad Mülller, Karl Vouk, Uroš Weinberger

Curator: Marko Košan

About the exhibition

Our lives became entrenched in a particularly ambiguous perception of reality: on the one hand, we are bewitched by unattainable and elusive electronic media images that have shaken our visual perception of the world to the core; on the other hand, desperate efforts are undertaken to preserve a certain imaginary symbolic order of civilization, as we transform anything that seems like an endangered value of yesterday’s world into a real or imagined museum – as if our linear culture of accumulating will collapse if we are unable to manage the past so that everyone can see it. Our concern with the restoration of this visible and physically tangible order is like some kind of a desperate unconscious defence mechanism of civilization, which is felt at the end of a certain stage, when it is faced each day more uncontrollably with the increasingly absurd disrespect for its own fundamental assumptions. The visible, tangible past, this at least seeming feeling of continuity, directs us towards no longer unequivocal goals at the very moment we feel endangered by the transgression of that which is ‘different’, foreign. In the past, these goals were most noble and sublime when they manifested themselves in art and culture.

But what happens when culture and art suddenly refuse to be merely the locus of secrets, seduction, initiation, the open and highly ritualised symbolic exchanges of spiritual goods in a community that has surrounded itself with barbed wire within its own borders? When art tries to preserve its role as an autonomous space of freedom … both freedom of the spirit and freedom within physical borderline space, which was in the past encumbered by immeasurable trauma of personal relations?

Excerpt from curatorial text by Marko Košan

More about the exhibition

Catalogue

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti.

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I am participating with the silkscreen prints In Serach of Freedom (Ecce homo). Stories written by Widad Tamimi.