ARTMargins is pleased to present new work by Barbara Kukovec (London/Ljubljana). All the images in the series were taken with self-made cameras, using film or paper treated with a photographic emulsion and printed in the darkroom on different surfaces. Kukovec was born in Slovenia in 1980 and has worked as an actor, dancer, and performer in a diverse range of theatre and dance productions.
Katarzyna Pabijanek: My first question concerns the Women’s House(Sunglasses) project you started in 1998. It has just been shown at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (Practice Makes the Master, curated by Magdalena Ziółkowska). Could you say something about the background of the project and, especially, about its current Polish version?
It does not take more than a fleeting glance at much of contemporary art practice to realize that Conceptual art is still with us. The similarities go beyond stylistic continuity. Conceptual art’s concern with fundamental questions of artistic meaning and interpretation has endowed art with an awareness of its own conditions and its relationship with a wide range of social life. Indeed, most art today is indebted to the efforts of Conceptual artists in the 1960s for breaking the spell of Greenbergian modernism and opening up a wider range of issues than had previously been accepted.
My studies of the history of 20th century Lithuanian art were based on reproductions. The rest of my generation and some of the preceding ones had no choice in the matter either; for almost 20 years, the closure of the permanent exposition of 20th century works in Vilnius' Town Hall made it impossible for younger generations to get acquainted with the country’s art classics directly. It was only on June 20, 2009 that the National Gallery of Art (NGA) reopened, in the building of the former Museum of Revolution in Vilnius, finally providing an opportunity to see the works that had previously been available only as low-quality reproductions.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ARTMargins is launching an Open Forum on Marginality. The forum is dedicated to the status of the periphery in politics, art, and criticial discourse today. Click here to read responses and add your comments.
