Vesna Bukovec

Everything I eat turns to health, beauty and love

Exhibition: Everything I eat turns to health, beauty and love / Vse kar pojem, se spremeni v zdravje, lepoto in ljubezen (Solo presentation by Vesna Bukovec)
Location: Kulturni inkubator, Koroška 18, Maribor
Date: March 12, 2010 at 7pm

The exhibition is part of the project Videodinner / Video večerja

Curator: Aleksandra Saška Gruden

About the exhibtion:
In her recent projects Vesna Bukovec is exploring the impact of consumer society, shopping culture and popular positive psychology in the formation of identity, subjective well-being and self-image of the modern individual.

At the Videodinner she will serve delicious pancakes made of oatmeal and a series of videos on the topic of positive affirmation. A positive affirmation is a concept of popular psychology: it is a positive sentence repeated many times in order to impress the subconscious mind and trigger it into action.
Repetitive gestures and statements in videos will be joined with repetitive gestures of making pancakes.

About the Videodinner:
Videodinner project is a set of events to be carried out once a month. In each single evening the invited artist prepares a thematic video projection and conceptually connects it with the cooking addition. Each Video Dinner project is an individual concept by the invited author, drawing from his/hers personal attitudes, thoughts and interests. It may be a response to the current creative research, or to the previous work.
The set of Videodinners is diverse and covers a broad range of approaches and confessions.
The selection of artists is also diverse and is not limited to their space and time. Individual authors may focus on specific details: the color, shape, taste, purpose, content, design…
The selection of artists is made by Aleksandra Saška Gruden.

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With the help of Aleksandra I made lots of pancakes.
Besides the White Performances/Positive Affirmations I have also presented my other videos and some of the videos from KOLEKTIVA.

Komunikacijske mreže / Communication Networks

Exhibition: Komunikacijske mreže / Communication Networks; Art institutions and New Publics
Location: Mestna galerija Ljubljana
Date: March 11 – April 11, 2010

Visual Notes: A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro; P74 Center and Gallery, Ljubljana; Center for visual culture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; ICA -Sofia; MGML, Mestna galerija Ljubljana; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Open Space, Vienna; The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon

Artists: Botner and Pedro / Guga Ferraz / Laura Lima / Ernesto Neto / Alexandre Vogler / Vesna Bukovec / Mina Petrović & Vera Backović / Bik Van der Pol / Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber / Aleksandar Dimitrijević / Dubravka Sekulić & Dunja Predić & Davor Ereš / Sanja Jovović / Jakob Kolding / Stefan Römer / Dušan Šaponja & Dušan Čavić / Mark Terkessidis / Milica Lapčević & Vladimir Šojat / Kalin Serapionov / Boštjan Bugarič / Domen Grögl / Apolonija Šušteršič / Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammmer / Avi Mograbi / Haim Ben Shitrit / Erzen Shkololli / Boaz Arad / Fikret Atay

Curators: Alenka Gregorič, Bojana Piškur

About the exhibtion:
At the present, when virtually all institutions operating in the sphere of culture are primarily concerned with statistics about the numbers of their visitors, the strategies and marketing tactics to increase these numbers and attract more and more sponsors at the same time, it has become almost obsolete to speak of the “subjects” who make up these numbers, that is, the visitors to the various cultural and artistic events – the museum public. … What kind of strategies and dynamics of work involving several situations, institutions, and discourses are not identified by or subject to these spaces? How can networking be set up in environments that are very specific? How can a new art institution establish itself in a given space? How can long-term associations with the local environment be established? How can the traps of multicultural exoticism be avoided?

More… / Več…

I am participating with the project Local Issues

Umetnica – umetnost preživetja / Female Artist – the Art of Survival

Exhibition: Umetnica – umetnost preživetja / Female Artist – the Art of Survival
Location: Project Room SCCA, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana
Date: March 4 – 8, 2010

Artists: Martina Bastarda, Vesna Bukovec, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Zvonka Simčič, Nataša Skušek, Hana Repše, Katarina Toman Kracina

Curators: Ana Grobler, Jadranka Ljubičić

About the exhibtion:
Exhibition of contemporary feminist art from Slovenia
Part of the international feminist and queer festival Rdeče Zore / Red Dawns 2010

Criterion of selection of works has been diversified and engaged approach in work and on declarations of authors. Works are results of their personal experiences. Already the fact that there are not many male artists, who would present their position in such a way, speaks that the situation of women artists is not uniform and equal. The women authors in addition to artistic creation, which is a job for more than a full-time, perform many other tasks: the household, childcare, care that their work stays recognized in the art world.

More about the exhibition

I am participating with the project The Only Thing I Can Control Is My Attitude Towards Life.

Photos by Jasmina Klančar

(Ne)močne / (Un)empowered

Exhibition: (Ne)močne / (Un)empowered
Location: Delavski dom Trbovlje
Date: March 2 – 19, 2010

Artists: Vesna Bukovec, Aprilija Lužar, Sladjana Mitrović, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Hana Repše, Duba Sambolec, Zvonka Simčič, Nataša Skušek, Maja Slavec, Alenka Spacal, Evelin Stermitz, Vita Žgur

Curator: Ana Grobler

About the exhibtion:
Socially “prescribed” norms, roles and even laws, impeding activities of women in their daily life, are a reality. Household chores are an obligation taken for granted to be performed by women; care for children, their upbringing and education are informally appointed to women, omnipresent requirements for a young, beautiful and fit female body, laws and regulations depriving women of independent control over one’s reproduction, insurance business distinguishing between genders, overlooked and hushed violenece are all facts, leading to discrimination pushing women to the outskirts of public life.

More about the exhibition (pdf)

I am participating with the video Endless Game.

10 years the One Minutes

Exhibition: 10 years the One Minutes
Location: Kunsthal KAdE Amersfoort, The Netherlands
Date: November 28, 2009 – February 14, 2010
Organized by: Sandberg Institute & The One Minutes Foundation, Amsterdam

My video Important News is selected for the 10 years the One Minutes exhibition as one of the best of the year 2006. It will be also published on accompanying catalogue in the form of a DVD.

More info:
– Invitation (pdf)
– List of participating videos (doc)
– www.kunsthalkade.nl/tentoonstelling.php?item=413
– www.theoneminutes.org/a560…kunsthal-kade
– www.theoneminutes.org/m20060476sr10…world-one-minutes-important-news-vesna-bukovec

The Only Thing I Can Control Is My Attitude Towards Life

Exhibition: Vesna Bukovec, The Only Thing I Can Control Is My Attitude Towards Life (Edina stvar, ki jo imam pod nadzorom, je moj odnos do življenja)
Location: Miklova hiša Gallery, Ribnica
Date: October 1 – 31, 2009
Curated by: Urška Jurman

You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the solo exhibition The Only Thing I Can Control Is My Attitude Towards Life (Edina stvar, ki jo imam pod nadzorom, je moj odnos do življenja) by Vesna Bukovec. The opening will take place on Thursday, October 1st at 6 pm in the Miklova hiša gallery in Ribnica, Slovenia.

This is the fifth exhibition in a series in which selected curators (so far Zdenka Badovinac – Uršula Berlot, Andrej Medved – Mitja Ficko, Simona Vidmar – Sašo Sedlaček, Nevenka Šivavec – Matej Košir and on this ocassion Iztok Hotko – Vesna Bukovec) select one artist for a solo exhibition from the artists who participated at the annual post graduate students exhibition of Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana, 2. M (this time the selection was made from the 2004 exhibition).

At this exhibition Vesna Bukovec presented the video It Will Be OK and a series of drawings. Both works deal with the self-help culture and the dictate of positive thought as two cultural formations that importantly form and express the contemporary subjectivity.

Vesna Bukovec takes a closer look at psychology, which is worked and distributed through the various forms of popular culture. The authoress directs her criticism towards the over simplification of the complexity of our emotions and life circumstances, which – in the context of exaggerated positive orientation (It Will Be OK) and the various psychological tests that she addresses in her drawings – seem as a merely insignificant comment. At this she uses irony, repetition and eclecticism as her artistic strategy, with which she holds a mirror against the absurdity of the narcissistic care of oneself.

Photos from the exibition