Sunday 22 May 2016

MG+MSUM – Ljubljana Museum of Contemporary Art 1

[seen 10/05/16]


Rather than attempting anything like “art criticism”, since I went to this museum, and found it really inspiring, this is a bit of ultra-low-budget curation, in keeping with the current way the museum is laid out – with stuff from their permanent collection arranged across three floors under the banner ‘Low-Budget Utopias’. As with seemingly everything else I saw in Ljubljana, it’s shot through with this amazing political awareness and constant self-deconstruction, but deconstruction that actually *creates* something.

Very early on in the exhibition there’s a room dedicated to Slovenia’s punk rock scene of the late-seventies and eighties. It consists of a wall of fanzines...


...three tv screens showing documentary footage...


...a projector showing stills of what might be one night in one punk club or every photo ever taken of Slovenia’s punk scene...


...and another projector cycling through what Slovenia’s philosophers of the day had to say about it.


And, I think that was it. Having all this stuff put in a dedicated room in a musuem – a room that was fully conscious of the irony of museum-ising punk – somehow managed to communicate both how small-scale, and how important it was. It was really moving, and really charming. Should punk be “moving” and “charming”? No. But it was. Probably at the time, and definitely now. Moreover, they were still playing the music, and the music was still really good. So.




[Yes! Show me more of this museum...]

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