January 18 - February 20, 2004
AREA KOLABORATIVA
Curator: Dunja Kukovec

You are kindly invited to attend the opening of the exhibition on
Wednesday, January 28th at 8 p.m. at Škuc Gallery.

Alongside the exhibition, a publication "READER 02 / Area Kolaborativa" is to be published including articles by Geert Lovink, Felix Stadler, Anna Viseu, Marthe Woodmasee, Critical Art Ensemble and others. The articles discuss the new definitions of collective and group authorship and the free exchange of information. Editors of the publication: Nataša Petrešin, Dunja Kukovec.

Opening Event
Borut Savski - Tools-Weapons
Nico Dockx & Building Transmissions - musical performance. Samples and other musical material are being collected from the local "scene" for the event, which will include the release of an album with the Curious label in Antwerpen, Belgium, featuring the material that will come into being at the Ljubljana event.

In the time of new technologies, new creative practices are emerging, which are with the aid of electronic communication tools creating new social worlds. The main theme of the exhibition is collaborative and collective authorship, which redefines the notion of the artist as an individual, as well as, the product as a completed art object. The exhibition does not research closed groups within collaborative authorship, but presents new ways of collaborating, behaving and functioning.

It is typical for the Area Kolaborativa exhibition that the exhibited works in a creative and interactive way present the projects, which predominantly take form within the framework of the Internet. They "take advantage" of the Internet as a creative, communicative and distributive means, in which most of the projects have a certain one, or a group of initiators. The initiator, or rather, the artist, in the exhibition at this time is not the one who exhibits the completed work, but someone who is capable of creating an open platform which draws in individuals, makes a furthering of inter-relationships possible, and redefines the view of property. An open and participatory way of working devaluates the need of hierarchical structures and presents other regulative models: modelling, group decision-making, possibility of personal choice, etc. These types of creative practices have been defined by the theoretician Matthew Fuller as "Not Just Art". He explains them as projects, which go along with art and are able to exist within its economy; in the same instance they are able to survive outside of this particular framework. From the art context they pass over into the field of wider society, whilst at the same time connecting with various social groups, be they, activists, scientists, theoreticians, etc.

The works on exhibition are removed from institutionalised contemporary art and present creative, reversible, usable and expert approaches into the age of the post-digital.

Area Kolaborativa is the third exhibition project in the framework of Škuc Gallery's Local talk programme, which presents projects curated by local guest curators.

Collaborators:
Acoustic Space Lab (Riga), Nico Dockx & Building Transmissions (Antwerpen), Honor Harger & Adam Hyde - Frequency Clock (Auckland), microsound.org, Krsto Papić (Zagreb), Florian Schneider - expertbase.net (Munich), Cybermohalla (New Delhi), Borut Savski (Ljubljana), Linux Screensavers.

For further information, please contact Exhibition Curator Dunja Kukovec or Artistic Director of Škuc Gallery Alenka Gregorič.