Deej Fabyc:
Daddy was a spy for the Soviet Union
Lecture and presentation of work in progress

Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 19.00
SCCA Project Room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

You are cordially invited to the lecture Daddy was a spy for the Soviet Union by the British/Australian artist Deej Fabyc, on Thursday 21st April at 7pm to SCCA Project Room.

Deej Fabyc who has already exhibited an art video in Ljubljana as a part of a group exhibition of the International feminist and queer festival Red Dawns, is now staying in Artist's Asylum at Metelkova Mesto as an artist in residence. During this time she will have a lecture and a presentation of her artistic and curatorial work at the SCCA Project Room.
The focus of the lecture will be set to the present artistic work she is developing here in Slovenia. In the middle of June 2011, she will return to Ljubljana for a few days to realize a set of performances and an installation as part of her solo exhibition at the Alkatraz Gallery.

Process and research are important for her engaged performance/video presentations. In the case of the work in progress for her forthcoming exhibition at the Alkatraz Gallery she takes as a starting point, the fact that she lived in Ljubljana for a few months as a child. As a child she believed that her father might have been a spy, since he was travelling a lot and worked in several “Eastern Block” countries during the late 60's and 70's. As a consultant statistician for the Tito's administration in 1970 he worked in Ljubljana. It was the only time he brought his family with him on these consultancies. During her stay in Ljubljana in 1970 she was living at the Bellevue Hotel with her family. Her plan is to disclose concealed traces of public and private histories through which we inhabit and see the city. She will trace the childhood memories on a journey taking a path as a cartographer both of her own memory and potential made up details, layering an alternative history onto the city. The search began at the Archive of the Republic of Slovenia, and now continuing further.

For the presentation Fabyc will present some stories about her earlier works and ask the audience to engage with her in the current investigation. With Your help and contribution, the artistic work might evolve even further. As part of her work she has been tracing leads on her father, Paul Duncan Jones. This lecture is also a call for information connected to him.
If You want to share Your memories about him or the Bellevue Hotel, please contact the Alkatraz Gallery at: galerija.alkatraz@gmail.com.

Deej Fabyc
The artist’s opus addresses psychological dimension of a personal and political experience of trauma. She is an artist who is fascinated by the resonance of personal histories in the context of a wider public concern and an engagement with social systems. Her work takes up “the personal is political” as read and does not differentiate between art and life. Having worked with large scale performative installations and video in the 1990’s in the last decade she has focused more on film and live engaged performance as these are more portable mediums. Deej Fabyc has exhibited widely internationally since the early 1990’s. Key exhibitions include Dialogue curated Theo Tegalaars at W139 gallery in Amsterdam, Contempora at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the touring exhibition Don’t Call it Performance curated by Paco Barragan which premiered at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and concluded at El Museo Del Barrio in New York. She is also committed to exhibiting and working with other artists as part of her practice and produces this through her directorship of Elastic Residence in London since 2004 and as part of KISSS a group of artists interested in issues concerned with surveillance. She has curated numerous exhibitions in London and Australia. The artist lives in London, and is the current visiting lecturer in Time Based Media at London Metropolitan University.

Production: KUD Mreža/Alkatraz Gallery
Masarykova 24, 1000 LJUBLJANA
www.kudmreza.org/alkatraz/
www.galerijalkatraz.org

Coproduction: Art center, Institution for Development and Art
Dunajska 196, 1000 Ljubljana
www.artcenter-slovenia.org

In cooperation with: SCCA-Ljubljana
www.scca-ljubljana.si

[Published April 18, 2011]