The stage is taken by students from the photography department at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, a department that does not shy away from absolute self-criticism, heretical volte-faces with regard to their own assumptions and creating new ideas on the ashes of the old. There is no better platform for not fulfilling expectations about beauty in art, pleasant concepts and successful models of inclusion of the arts in modern economic currents. Therefore we decided to form a group of young artists whose new works will clearly accentuate, rather than sublimate, social antagonisms.
For this occasion, the young artists have developed a new joint project in which the photographic possibilities when considering a given situation have been developed spatially. The gallery space has therefore become a frame in which they attempt to capture the photographic punctum before it is transformed into the studium. Here it is clear that we are dealing with a paradoxical notion, as the punctum – the unsymbolisable, direct effect of photography before any contextualisation – is transformed into its opposite, culturally transmitted meaning whenever it is set into a recognisable symbolic system (material, language, etc.). Therefore this impossible assignment will be articulated as a stabilisation, a creation of clever relationships which in fact maintain a certain amount of tension and uncertainty, a nearly self-preserving condition found in a continuous foretelling of loss. Surplus is the antithesis of profit, and art is the antithesis of expectation.
The young artists present their work with the warning that this art is not here to celebrate “successful” economic models, but to subvert them. Success, when applied to art, has different parameters. We are therefore opening the Little Gallery to the uneconomical and the prodigal, an affirmation of art as an inexhaustible source of ideas about how to see things and do things differently.
Artists: Jure Goršič, Jure Grom, Luka Prijatelj, Sara Rman, Anja Seničar, Mario Župan
Mentor: izr. prof. Peter Koštrun, Peter Rauch
MGBS Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
Production: Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
