Between 22 March and 1 April 2023, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška will once again host the International Traveling Art Competition Exhibition and the cultural event “Play with me”, organized by the Janez Levec Center Ljubljana and the Association for the Culture of Inclusion. The central cultural event (workshops, gatherings and exhibition installation) will take place on Wednesday, 22 March 2023, between 10 AM and 12 PM, while the exhibition will be open to the public from 1 PM onwards.

At the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, we are in favour of various types of cooperation, connections and projects with other institutions, and we also wish that the museum be open and accessible to everyone, including various vulnerable groups. Ten years ago, we started cooperating with the Janez Levec Center and the Association for the Culture of Inclusion, which are organizing the international art competition Play with Me. The competition will be followed by an exhibition of selected works at the Museum, which will be opened this year on Wednesday, 22 March 2023. The aim of the competition and the exhibition is to promote the inclusion of children, adolescents and adults with special needs among the majority population of all generations, as well as in the wider society.

Every year, two themes are chosen for the competition call, this year these are Play with Me and Forest, Our Friend, which were represented equally, but they were also intertwined in terms of motifs. In the first, there were motifs of spending free time in nature, scenes of playing sports and various social games, while in the second, the importance of actively spending free time in nature was emphasized, concern for the preservation of forests was expressed, and the forest was often depicted in different seasons. The selection of artworks included in the exhibition was made by the curator Nina Popič from the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška and the art educator Kaja Jeseničnik, and it was based on the excellence of the selected art technique and on the variety and originality of the motifs.

4,902 works were submitted to this year’s competition, 675 of which were selected for the exhibition. 327 different institutions from 9 countries participated. In addition to institutions from Slovenia, institutions from Croatia, Serbia, China, North Macedonia, Italy, Ukraine, France and Slovakia participated, the latter participating for the first time this year.

At the Museum, we are organizing an opening program that is adapted to the participants socializing, taking part in workshops and setting up an exhibition together. Slovenian primary and secondary schools, institutes or other organizations from the whole region of Koroška, as well as individuals whose works were selected for the exhibition, are helping and participating in the event. Through various didactic games and the story of Koki the Raven and Jože Tisnikar, the participants of the event will get to know the museum, become curators and set up the exhibition themselves.

The selected artworks will be on display free of charge at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška until 1 April 2023, and after the end of the exhibition, they will travel to various Slovenian institutions.