Exhibiting in Slovenia. A Symposium upon the 110th Anniversary of the Jakopič Pavilion
5 and 6 December 2019, Conference Hall at the City Museum of Ljubljana, Gosposka 15, Ljubljana

You are cordially invited to symposium on the exhibiting of art, architecture, and design, and on exhibition institutions in Slovenia.

We have recently celebrated a few respectable anniversaries of Slovenian art institutions. In 2017, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec celebrated its 60th anniversary. In 2018, we marked the centennial of the National Gallery of Slovenia and the 70th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. This year we are celebrating 65 years of the Maribor Art Gallery, 45 years of Božidar Jakac Art Museum in Kostanjevica na Krki, and the 110th anniversary of the opening of the Jakopič Pavilion, the first venue built expressly for the exhibition of art in Slovenia.

These important anniversaries are a good reason not only for celebration, but also for a more in-depth reflection on our over 100 years of practice in regularly exhibiting art, architecture, and design. The good response of the speakers and the variety of content related to exhibiting, recently researched and placed into an international context, prove the topicality of the symposium’s theme.

We open the symposium with the art societies that, in the middle of the 19th century, were the first to introduce in Slovene lands a more regular exhibiting of contemporaneous art. Further selected exhibitions, exhibition programmes, institutions, and other phenomena related to exhibiting are discussed and evaluated in a chronological order and from a variety of perspectives. A large share of the contributions reflect on the more lasting thematic, programmatic, geographic, or political orientations of the institutions, which have proven to be important, even decisive actors in directing and shaping our art field. We focus also on research on the accelerated institutionalisation of art, architecture, and design after World War II, and into how and why the wave of cyclic, especially biennial events occurred soon after. The symposium concludes with analyses of contemporary curatorial practices, new exhibition formats, and also new forms of institutions characteristic of recent decades.

In addition to the delineated new knowledge, the symposium offers introspection and attempts to clarify those effects of our activity that are harder to trace. The desire for a more in-depth understanding of both the exhibition medium itself and the inner logic and workings of the Slovenian art system surface in reflections on how and why a certain approach to exhibiting appears and establishes itself, what its relation to the exhibited objects and art in general is, and how it intertwines with political and other non-art discourses and aspirations.

The symposium is being organised in cooperation with the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška and Božidar Jakac Art Museum, and supported by ERSTE Foundation.

Program …