The In Search of the Big Dipper exhibition is based on the specific situation of our contemporaneity, and places its demands at the centre of interest. Contemporary art is made under the imperative of topicality, diligent involvement in society, and the pretension of changing it or at least influencing it. Although this hyper production of didactic stances is highly equivocal regarding the possibility of having an effect on its environment, this in no way diminishes its rhetorical fervour; quite the reverse. It is this very discord between the declarative ambition of works of contemporary art and their content that informs the thinking of the sculpture students at the University of Ljubljana’s Academy of Fine Arts and Design.
Thus it is that the works in the exhibition speak through the aesthetics of an amusement park, a glittering, screaming meeting place where we spin in circles in a saturated spectacle. This ironic staging in no way implies that the exhibition is taking the aforementioned moralising tone, albeit spoken from the other side. On the contrary, the works primarily reflect themselves, questioning what remains when we subtract the lofty rhetoric and emancipatory slogans from contemporary art. In fact, they begin to speak more physically, as objects that on one hand testify to a certain emptiness, but on the other wonder whether real value might lie in this empty shell, and what it actually is. Although it seems that we are sliding dangerously towards the obsolete discourse of modernism, the works in the exhibition do not shy away from this risk, but instead incorporate it into their modus operandi and use it to their advantage.
One example is Isidora Todorić’s Say No to Modernism / Plastic Jesus / Linden God, a pop culture icon reduced to an outline unable to shake off the weight of its pedestal. Nina Tovornik’s Untitled works differently, where the ironic crash of a classical head and a spinning wheel produces a deliberately naive, textbook post-conceptual object of ambitious quotation, where rhetorical ambition is replaced with a healthy dose of humour. Questioning the status of the art object and the possibility of overcoming its fetishistic attachment is the focus of Maja Gregl and Lučka Centa in the interactive work S.U.M., while Tom Winkler’s ½ Airdancer, a parody of a popular advertising format, is in a way a metaphorical summary of the exhibition and its efforts: “poor”, an empty object that, as if in an awkward choreography, is trying to free itself from its attachments.
Students: Lučka Centa, Maja Gregl, Isidora Todorić, Nina Tovornik, Tom Winkler
Menthor: prof. Alen Ožbolt
Production: Akademija za likovno umetnost in oblikovanje UL
MGBS Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
