In the spirit of the French Revolution's famous motto “equality”, the Paris 2024 Paralympics achieved new milestones in promoting the values of integration, inclusion and equality in sport. Athletes, their accompanying persons and fans (for the first time in Slovenia's history, also through live TV broadcasts) witnessed an extraordinary event that inspired the world on many levels. The GAMES OF COURAGE exhibition brings the exceptional spirit of the Paris Games to Ljubljana.

The GAMES OF COURAGE show provides a first-hand insight into the recently concluded and in many ways historic Paralympic Games, considered to be the world’s largest parasports event. All photographs have been contributed by a renowned sports photographer, one of the few in Slovenia with extensive experience in the field of parasports.
 

Vid Ponikvar, whose career spans more than 25 years, is widely regarded to be one of Slovenia’s leading sports photographers. Vid’s photographs of athletic events often succeed in capturing the game’s palpable emotions, its raw dynamic. After London, Rio and Tokyo, the Paris Games have been the fourth Paralympics with Vid Ponikvar as the official photographer for the Slovenian team.

The exhibition has been realised through the support of Loterija Slovenije, a long-time sponsor of parasports.

Curator: dr. Tadej Curk (Sports Museum)

Peter Gannushkin's photographs encapsulate the essence of live musicality, the atmosphere that pervades a concert. There’s a strong sense of heartfelt connection between the photographer and the theme he is addressing. He has close personal ties with many of his musician subjects. In approaching his work, Peter moves between strictly documentary and art photography. 

8 May – 27 June 2024
Opening 8 May 2024, at 20.00
 
9 May 2024
Lecture 9.30 – 10.30
Workshop 11:00 – 16:00
Alma Karlin Hall, Cankarjev dom
 
After the 9th edition held in 2023, the Independent Biennial is presenting a special selection of authors from Slovenia and abroad who have marked the visual landscape through their deep commitment to visual work. The showcase at Cankarjev dom’s Small Gallery will present the Independent Biennial and guest artists: their works and views on creative expression and their lives in various ways, including video presentations, original works, lectures and workshops. The exhibition will be on view between early May and late June 2024.
 
The showcase at the Small Gallery is dedicated to the space between design and artistic research ADRI, with the working title In Between. The presented artists question the visual space through curious playfulness, such as the construction of new worlds, light as an object, showing the unrepresented, mapping, multimedia and multidimensionality, and last but not least, the poetics of expression as well as the light and dark side of reality.

The diversity of the exhibition has been enriched by their research: Simon Jugovic Fink, Kiki Klimt, Petra Korent, LeaLudvik, Živa Moškrič and guests from abroad, Prof. Hilde Kramer (Bergen), Helen Mitchell (London), Tee Ken Ng (Perth).
 
The artists are also joined by the exhibited works of the ADRI experimental workshop with LAB Institute of Design and Fine Arts Lahti students, which was led by Saša Kerkoš and Marion Robinson and is a fresh edition of the 2023 ADRI project. The participating graphic design students include: Netta Aaltonen, Markus Aro, Pinja Hautanen, Ria Heinola, Tiia Heliävirta, Helmi Jäntti, Vieno Karjalainen, Nuutti Karjalainen, Sonja Karppelin, Ida Kinnunen, Santeri Lehto, Veera Miettunen, Anni Porkka, Melisa Rantala, Sami Rilla, Ella Ruuska, Pipsa Soimasuo, Evita Valtonen, Reetta Varjo and Mika Virtanen.
 
To build on the biennial year, the exhibition also presents selected works by NatanEsku, the recipient of the 1st Tomaž Kržišnik Recognition for lifelong commitment to sincere and unique artistic expression, awarded at the opening of the IXth Biennial of Slovenian Independent Illustration – Independent Biennial, October 23, 2023 in Kino Šiška.
His presentation to the public will also be accompanied by the heartfelt work of Prof. Tomaž Kržišnik – Kržo. Natan's works will also be presented in the Kržišnik Garden and Gallery (Žiri) in autumn 2024.
 
A short hands on experience will follow the Small Gallery opening ceremony on 8 May at 20:00.
The following day we will host a morning lecture (9:30-10:30) and a practical workshop (11:00-16:00) by Prof. Hilde Kramer and Helen Mitchell in Alma Karlin Hall situated within the same venue as the Small Gallery. Exploring and building Lost Specimen with Helen and finding the right shades of grey through the eyes of war and peace with Hilde will be a great gateway to creative explorations.
 
Registration for the lecture and workshop is free. Registration for the workshop is mandatory and the number of places is limited, please apply between 10 April – 1 May 2024 to info@bienaleneodvisnih.com.
 
www.bienaleneodvisnih.com
 

In 2024, Cankarjev dom is initiating a new exhibition series, The Visible Invisible. The series features art projects addressing issues and topics that tend to get "marginalized", sidelined and ignored. With the introduction of a new annual exhibition series on its premises, Cankarjev dom seeks to highlight and thus give voice and visibility to these frequently stigmatized and misunderstood issues.

The series begins with a project presented in partnership with ZRIPS (Institute for Development and Provision of Assisted Living Services) and photographer Blaž S. Kobal – an exhibition dedicated to portraits of persons with intellectual disabilities. With this project, the Institute aims to raise public awareness about intellectual disabilities, which continue to be stigmatized and overlooked. The photographer has devised the project as a series of portraits capturing the subjects’ diversity, kindness, openness, as well as inspiring and pleasant personality. 

The seventy portraits reflect the basic concept of the project. 
 

About the photographer:  
Hailing from the Primorska region, the young and talented photographer Blaž Stantič Kobal has pursued photography since secondary school. He has participated in several photo contests, including Rovinj Photodays (2021), where he won second prize with the series Melancholy Thoughts. This same series earned him first prize at the photo competition of the 2021 Vizije Festival, organised by Slovenia’s Public Fund for Cultural Activities.
People and their living spaces are at the heart of his interests and visual observation. Through his photographs, Stantič Kobal examines social issues, interpersonal relationships and people’s connectedness with their daily working and living environments.

In his artistic practice, Matic Pandel focuses on urban landscapes and everyday scenes in which he finds humour, paying special attention to their materiality, compositions and foregrounded details, all of which enables a different reading of our surroundings in sync with the exhibition as a medium. This is because the showcase is becoming a world unto itself, a world whose distinguishing elements – moulded in the artist's singular visual language – combine to make a completely new landscape. 

Matic Pandel graduated in photography from the Faculty of Applied Sciences VIST in Ljubljana in 2018, and is currently pursuing a master's degree from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. He has participated in several group exhibitions at venues that include the DobraVaga Gallery, Photon, Aksiom, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Cirkulacija2, Fotopub Festival and KULA Cetinjska Gallery in Belgrade. In 2019, he won the 5th Zine Vitrine International Zine Open Call, which involved a solo show at Kino Šiška. He belongs to the photo studio and creative space ŠTUDIO, whose members (Nik Erik Neubauer, Lucija Rosc, Bor Cvetko, Jaka Teršek and Anja Smaka) – while employing different approaches to the photographic medium – all share an interest in contemporary photographic practices and creating various personal projects.
 

The art exhibition is dedicated to the great architect, all-round visionary and humanist who adopted a multidisciplinary approach to designing his works and understood architecture in the context of visual culture. Three artistic considerations celebrate the invaluable legacy of a leading modernist of the geographic area formerly known as Yugoslavia, as well as beyond its borders: through the prism of the dimension of living, Nina Čelhar, Meta Drčar and Tadej Vaukman present their own understanding, interpretation and actualization of Ravnikar's legacy, as well as the architect as a private individual.

Vaukman primarily works in the medium of photography, frequently combining it with collage and drawing. The artist, whose work is grounded in (self-)portraiture, based his research on Ravnikar's drawings and self-portraits. 

Nina Čelhar, whose painting practice focuses on depicting idealized minimalist interiors and questions the complex relationship between architecture and its users, will tap directly into Ravnikar's architectural legacy. 

The dialogue is complemented by the spatial installations by Meta Drčar, who explores the connections between the observer's moving body, sculpture and architecture, and the performative effects that arise from this process. 

Slovenian jazz composer, improviser, percussionist and educator is based in the village of Vipolže in Western Slovenia’s Goriška Brda region. Photographer Nika Hölcl Praper is examining the question whether an address, a place of residence, is even relevant to an artist-cosmopolite, whether a man’s true home and place of refuge is not simply one’s state of mind. The photos were taken at Kaučič’s concerts and his home. The exhibition shows two worlds: his “altar of confession” – the stage – and his personal space, chiefly aiming to provide an inside look at the musician’s everyday life. With Kaučič, there seem to be no boundaries between music and life, between the public and private spheres. 

Nika Hölcl Praper built her photography career after graduating in sociology and philosophy in Ljubljana. In addition to concert photography, she focuses on other areas of culture and the arts, especially in the Koroška region (Carinthia). She takes part in projects aimed at raising awareness and integrating the arts into education. The central core of her curiosity lies in merging ethics and aesthetics, and exploring the boundaries between light and dark.

 

In June, you are cordially invited to attend a public guided tour of the exhibition “Tilyen Mucik: Floriography”, on view at Cankarjev dom’s Small Gallery:

13 June 2023, at 18.00

The tour is conducted by the exhibition's author, Tilyen Mucik, and curator, Hana Čeferin.
 

Tilyen Mucik’s Floriography exhibition addresses the issue whether flowers are capable of saying more than words, while exploring the ways in which various floral combinations communicate with the viewers. Floriography is the name for the language of flowers, i.e., the use of specific flowers and their combinations for expressing hidden meanings and one’s sentiments for others. The popularisation of floriography dates back to the Victorian era, when plant collecting and creating herbaria were a popular pastime, and expressing one’s feelings openly was regarded as undesirable in the fairly conservative society. The first dictionary of floriography, published in France in 1819 under the title Le langage des fleurs, quickly became popular in Victorian upper classes. Honeysuckle is supposed to evoke sweet dreams of love, basil symbolises open hatred, rose is a token of passionate love and belladonna implies death.  Some of these meanings have been preserved to this day, and Mucik’s photography focuses on their contemporary contexts and possible interpretations.

Nature and botany have been of enduring interest to the artist. As a child, she would carefully collect flowers in herbaria, a habit she has never discontinued. In time, a photographic herbarium replaced the one compiled in childhood, and the artist has been documenting various plants with undiminished sense of wonder and interest. If her work primarily involves examining and observing nature, the natural world is often present quite literally. In her early works, the artist experimented with the techniques of anthotype, an analogue photographic technique where flower-, fruit- and vegetable-based natural pigments are added to the emulsion, and the chlorophyll process where photographic images are imprinted onto the surface of plant leaves through exposure to sunlight. She continued her commitment to experimentation in subsequent photographic series, focusing on botany through a blend of analogue and digital processes, different printing techniques and layouts of photo and plant combinations. 
While first mainly directing her artistic focus on flowers and blossoms, Mucik gradually began to incorporate less conventional plants into her compositions. Spanning several art series created since 2018, the current exhibition integrates different artwork shapes, sizes and techniques with a view to summarizing the artist’s love of flora and diverse manifestations of plant life. From the magnifications of seemingly unremarkable seeds, which in large formats come across as some kind of extra-terrestrial organisms; and photographs of halophytes, plant species adapted to living solely in a saline environment; symbiotic combinations of artificial materials and plants in the Forced Symbiosis series; to scanography of different combinations of flowers and green plants. Botany most directly features in the Shrubs series, where natural “plantness” is returned to plant photographs by colorizing them with plant-based natural pigments, stitching them with yucca-harvested thread, burying analogue films in soil and observing the process of their disintegration. 
While floriography may no longer be as popular a practice as it was in Victorian times, flowers, with their aesthetic appeal and ever strong symbolic connotations, remain of continuing relevance, both in everyday rituals and as contemporary art motifs. An incredibly wide array of artists  seems to have taken an interest in flowers at some point in their creative careers, being intrigued by their elusive meaning and appearance, their aesthetic value, as well as their life cycle that has symbolised the transience of human life for centuries. For Tilyen Mucik, the key to observing this botanical diversity is as much the wide range of plant species (from meadow flowers to green plants, halophytes and tropical vegetation) as constant technical experimentation. After all, the artist also associates her communication with and reflection on the world with the concept of floriography, often using flowers to express her emotions and thoughts. The language of flowers has become the language of the artist who has conveyed her love of botany time and time again. 

Hana Čeferin

Tilyen Mucik (1995) is a visual artist who lives and works in Ljubljana. After graduating from The Faculty of Applied Sciences (VIST) in 2018, she finished her master studies in Photography at the Academy of Visual art and Design in Ljubljana in 2022. Since 2011, she has exhibited her works in Slovenia and internationally (among others at the Božidar Jakac gallery, Galerija Fotografija gallery, P74 gallery, Ljubljana City Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art MSUM+, Museum of Arts and Crafts Zagreb and Galerie Albrecht in Berlin). Her works were published in different online and printed magazines, such as Wotisart?, SemiMagazine, Float magazine and F-stop magazine. She is the recipient of the ALUO Float Photo Magazine curator's award (2022), received a Special Mention by Envision Arts (2020) and won second place in the category “Artistic concept” at the Rovinj PhotoDays festival (2018). Her works were presented at several international art fairs: Vienna Contemporary, Photo Basel, Paris Photo, Unseen, Zero Pixel, YIA Paris. Among her most recognizable series are Flora Femina (2018) and Shrubs (2020), which both explore the artist's love of botanical photography, alternative photographic processes, and plant-based pigments.

Hana Čeferin (1995) holds a Master's degree in Art History. Since 2015, she has been a collaborator of Galerija Fotografija in Ljubljana, where she has worked with Slovenian and international artists. Between 2022 – 2023, she worked in the curatorial department of Kunsthalle Wien. Since 2023, she is head of the Design Biennial BIO28. Since 2021 she has been the editor of the contemporary art magazine ETC., and the director of the eponymous institution. As an independent curator, she has collaborated with Cankarjev dom, Škuc Gallery and the National Gallery, among others. She regularly publishes critical and art historical articles in journals and magazines. Between 2020 and 2022, she participated in the School for Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing – World of Art, which is part of SCCA Ljubljana. 

Foyer I is closed between 6–9 May 2023, throughout the duration of the ECTES Congress. 
Cankarjev dom’s Small Gallery, CD Club and Alma Karlin Hall can be accessed from Erjavčeva Street. 


The following public guided tours of the exhibition “Andreas Müller-Pohle - Environmental Footprints”, on view at Cankarjev dom’s Small Gallery, are available in May:

10 May 2023 at 13.00
14 May 2023 at 11.00 (exhibition closing)

The tour is conducted by the exhibition's curator, Jan Babnik.
 

The work of Berlin-based artist Andreas Müller-Pohle revolves around the ontological and representational questions of photography, its essence and social meaning. His work explores the limits of both photography and reality, but above all his work is characterized by the oscillation between, as he points out in his article "Photographic Dimensions", the aesthetic, political and technological aspects of photography. Andreas never simply positions himself on one of these aspects – he devotes himself to research or rather to focusing on the subject of representation. In his work the categorical choice between high and low culture, between political engagement or aesthetic conservatism, between digital deconstruction or analogue reproduction – turns out to be wrong – one might say even insincere. For him, it is precisely the technological-aesthetic-political construction of the subject of representation that is at the forefront, which calls for diverse visual approaches. His oeuvre ranges from works dedicated to ontological questions of photography, through research works on the meaning of everyday images, political aspects of the visual, through complex photograms and videos addressing the ecological issues of recycling photographs, to projects combining photography, video and sound to deconstruct the environment. 

The exhibition Environmental Imprints presents selected works from Andreas's broader body of work Studies on Water and features photographs from the Danube and Hong Kong projects, video of Hong Kong's Shing Mun River, and sound of the waters of Hong Kong and the Danube. The selection of photographs and videos echoes the artist's exploratory approach and his ‘unalignment’ between the aesthetic, political and technological aspects of the visual. In the exhibited works the human environment is established through the in-between space of air and water – with its vague contours, compositional fractures and partial structures, the land in these works is a mere afterimage, a figment of playful imagination between the natural elements of water and air, crystallised almost at random – as a kind of aesthetic excess of their relationship. As if the land in the images of bridges, quays, ships, city skylines and dams – the land in the image of man, that is – is merely an excess product of the breaking of the waves and the current of the river – the flow of nature, which, in the exhibition, is complemented by its unconscious – the sound of water's depths.
 

Jan Babnik

Danube River Project, 2005  

The Danube is the most European of all rivers and the only one that crosses the continent from west to east. I became interested in a portrait of this river in 2004, after having dealt extensively with the subject of water a few years earlier. In Berlin, on the Spree River, I made my first tests with the split technique popular with divers, in which the camera looks half below and half above the surface of the water, thus combining two levels of landscape in one image. After months of further research, I made four trips between July and November 2005, first through Germany, Austria, and Slovakia, then to Hungary, then to Croatia and Serbia, and finally to Bulgaria and Romania. I took water samples at the shooting locations and inserted their chemical values into the pictures as a “blood count” of the river, so to speak. My way from the source in the Black Forest to the mouth in the Black Sea, 2800 kilometers long, was that of a traveler who only visited each place once and took the respective weather and light conditions as they came. Thus, the Danube River Project is ultimately a personal river log – a poetic-documentary interpretation that would certainly look very different today.
 

Hongkong Waters, 2009–2010

Hong Kong was my second home for many years and – until its seizure by the Chinese regime – a place of immense fascination. A hyper-vertical architecture rises from a tangle of picturesque water landscapes that present themselves in hundreds of islands with endless coasts and ports, canals and waterfalls. My long-cherished plan to have a city portrait follow the Danube project should not be realized anywhere else: Hong Kong, a city of water that has been exposed to a continuously rising sea level for decades and in which the element of water means life and threat at the same time. I began underwater tests on Hong Kong Island and Cheung Chau in the summer of 2008, and between January 2009 and December 2010 made seven trips, most of them lasting several weeks, during which I made not only the photographs but also numerous video and sound recordings that became part of the Hong Kong Waters project. In contrast to my river project with its consecutive course, the water landscapes of Hong Kong lay at my feet anew every day, and I like the idea of having followed a circular eastern mode after the linear western one.
 

Andreas Müller-Pohle, 2021