Projects of co-workers
Island in the City
Presentation of the International art biennale on an island of Susak
with discussion

Friday, 25 November 2016, 6pm
Project Room SCCA, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

We would like to inform you about the presentation of the international art biennial taking place on an island of Susak. Petra Varl (her website is a part of SCCA’s Internet Portfolio) regularly exhibits and collaborates at the art biennial.

Together with her colleagues, artists and curators: Tomislav Brajnović, Herzog Dellafiore, Daniel Devlin and Microcollection, we would like to invite you to join us on Friday, November 25, at 6pm in Project Room SCCA to discuss different positions towards the art fairs, biennales and museums of contemporary art sprouting up everywhere. Maybe now is the right time to confront our position and start a conversation. The discussion will be moderated by Gregor Dražil.

"Susak expo begins as an idea to extend platforms by exchanges of contexts and languages through dialogues between people and locations. It’s an idea on the move, an idea in translation. Translation can slip between languages to structure networks of thought. It enables simultaneous experiences to interact. It is vulnerable and open to incompletion as well as failure and misunderstanding. The project may fail or it may succeed, its outcome and even the idea of its completion is uncertain. And because of this openness it is vulnerable, this is its character.” (Jo Melvin, 2006)

International art biennale, that only a few people sees it by mistake
Susak expo is a contemporary art biennale that has taken place on the remote Croatian island of Susak since 2006. The original reason for organising the Susak expo was as a reaction to all the art fairs, biennales and museums of contemporary art sprouting up everywhere, and to highlight the absurdity of this proliferation by staging an international art biennale in the most unlikely of places where, apart from a few people seeing it by mistake and, of course, the participating artists, the chances are no-one will see it.

Since no-one sees the exhibition, the objects created for it (paintings, installations, photographs etc) lose importance, while what becomes central is the whole experience of artists sharing time and ideas. When the Expo is over, some of the objects and traces will still be there for a while, like strange artist droppings.

Participating artists have to accept the concept and possibility of failure, or even to embrace failure as a desirable outcome. The possibility of failure ensures the unpredictability of the expo. Susak expo is not just about isolation; it sits within a wider context and, whether politically or geographically, artists are encouraged to respond to the place and to reconsider their own practices.

Maybe the idea of the idealised imagined island – where one can disassociate oneself from the conformity of the outside world and hopefully work in a state of intellectual freedom – is an especially attractive idea in the aftermath of Brexit and the American election.

MORE: susakpress.org

Moderator

Gregor Dražil graduated from Art History at Ljubljana Faculty of Arts in 2014 and is currently finishing his MA at the same institution. His main focus of research is modern art, specifically the development of art exhibitions in Slovenia after the second world war. In the role of art critic at Radio Študent he also deals with contemporary art, focusing on the production of younger Slovenian artists. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

Participants in the discussion

Daniel Devlin is a publisher, curator and con-artist based in London. He started Susak expo in 2006 and has been organising it every other year since then. He is co-publisher of Spiralbound (a publisher of radical books that sit uncomfortably between the artist book and poetry publications) and the managing director of the gallery Sračok & Pöhlmann. As an artist, Devlin works mainly with wheel-barrows.

Tomislav Brajnović understands art as a field inseparable from our beliefs, thoughts and deeds that are mainly determined by the place and time of birth. After studying at the Academies in London, The Hague and Zagreb, he has established his profession within a specific, peripheral family environment in Golo Brdo near Rovinj in Croatia. Since 2013 he is an assistant professor for New Media at Art Academy in Rijeka in Croatia. In his work Brajnović deals with the eternal themes of ethics, morality and religion. He critically questions the role of ideology, politics and society and analyses the impact of consumerism, manipulation, media propaganda and the impact of collective and individual myths.

Herzog Dellafiore came to prominence on the art scene in the early 1990s as a performance and installation artist. Although he had a fair amount of success his frequent drunkenness and tendency to insult fellow artists and gallerists – culminating when he (unfairly) accused Bruce McLean of being a neo-formalist – led to his gradual disappearance  from the art scene. He has recently resurfaced giving lectures on the British art college circuit gaining many followers amongst the new wave of UK artists.

Microcollection/Elisa Bollazzi is an Italian artist and writer. She gave life to her Microcollection in 1990 at the Venice Biennale when almost by chance, picked up a few fragments that had accidentally fallen onto the floor from a fantastic work by Anish Kapoor. Those micro particles represented an intuition of a new form of creation!
Now Microcollection owns more than a thousand art-particles that Elisa Bollazzi and hundreds of spontaneous collaborators saved from oblivion. By contemplating the art-fragments under a microscope, the public can experience that intuition of a new form of creation, sense the invisible, become aware of the creative freedom and the potential ambiguity of images.

Petra Varl is an artist who mostly works in the media of drawing and installations. Since the year 2000 she has been teaching drawing and graphic arts at the Fine Arts Department of the Teacher’s College of the University of Maribor. She lives with her future husband in Ljubljana. Lately she has been drawing trees and cooking dinners.

More information
Petra Varl, petra@varl.si, tel: 041 389 470
Dušan Dovč / SCCA-Ljubljana, dusan.dovc@scca-ljubljana.si, tel: 051 361 681

[Published: November 22, 2016]