Red Dawns and Menza pri koritu present

Performance

Petja Grafenauer, Simon Macuh, Zoran Srdić Janežić (SLO): Mojca, ne jezi se (Mojca ärgere dich nicht (after german board game))

Marcelo Duchamp and Eva Babitz’s performans, documented by Julian Wasser, took place in Pasadena Museum of Art in 1963, together with a retrospective exhibition of M. Duchamp. Wider known as ‘The game of chess with a naked model’, the performans has been provocative since its inception. Petja Grafenauer, Simon  Macuh in Zoran Srdić Janežič have re-conceptualized it by employing a table game Ludo.

The performans has a socially-critical component. It refers to Ljubljana’s city official’s attack on cultural institutions for apparently exhibiting naked and half-naked female bodies. Therefore, the performans is dedicated to the city official in question.

This perfomans turns the actor roles portrayed in Duchamp’s performans on their heads. Instead of a privileged white male artist, controlling and dictating the whole situation, the woman is now in the position of power. Naked men alongside a dressed female curator make us think about the depiction and enaction of male nakedness, and challenge the hypocritical conventional reasoning about the appropriateness of female nudity in various contexts. The transformation from the real (nakedness as a lack of clothes) to the ideal (nudity), and into the ideal art form, forming the genre of the female nude in Western tradition (and still uncritically accepted today in the form of paid ads), does not happen in this performans. The nudity in it is real — through it, the performers take the stand of the art, in the context of which female nudity in Slovenia in this year has been numerously publicly attacked.

The performers and authors of ‘Mojca ne jezi se’:
Petja Grafenauer (1976) holds a PhD in Anthropology of contemporary art. She is a freelance independent curator, writer and lecturer. Her topics are mainly contemporary painting and its connection to other media and the construction of discourse in contemporary art. During 2005-2006 she was the editor of Department for arts and humanities at Radio Študent, one of the oldest and biggest European non-commercial radio stations. Between 2007 and 2009 she was a curator at Ganes Pratt gallery in Ljubljana. Since 2005 she is a lecturer on history of contemporary art at School of Arts at University of Nova Gorica. She regularly collaborates with SCCA Ljubljana and is coeditor of Slovenian art magazine Art Words. In 2008 her book on Slovenian painter Aleksij Kobal has been published and in 2010 she was the editor of Authentic interest by MSUM director Zdenka Badovinac. As a curator she is the author or coauthor of various projects, amongst other the exhibitions New tendencies (UGM, Maribor 2010), We want to be as free as our fathers were (MGLC Ljubljana, 2010), International Biennial of Graphic Arts: Matrix – unstable reality: 6 monkeys, 300 envelopes and 1 love: “Imperfect as always” (MGLC, Ljubljana 2009), 16th Slovene sculpture exhibition (Ljubljana, 2012). V letu 2013 samostojno pripravlja še razstavo Ignacija Uriarteja v Galeriji ŠKUC in razstavo Igorja Eškinje v Galeriji Alkatraz.

Zoran Srdić Janežič (in coproduction with Zavod GULAG): sculptor (Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana), visual artist and puppeteer works in a field of contemporary art: performing, sculpturing, drawing, printmaking, book design. Primarily interested in humour, which he uses to point out neuralgic points in our everyday life and global trends, he often applies theoretical concepts of contemporary philosophers in a field of visual art. As a performer he is interested in public sculptures and their functions in public space (Javni kipi, 2011); body art (aestheticization, repulsion and mythicization of the body; Corpus Indeterminata, 2010) and public interventions (Javna branja, 2011- ongoing).
He is employed as the creator of puppets in Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. His work was exhibited in 14 solo and 32 group exhibitions in Slovenia. He exhibits abroad as weel,  is a founder of an international sculpturing workshop Metamofoze nad has founded  Modri krog (Blue Circle was organizing exhibitions from 1999), the predecessor of art group Gulag Interventions – with colleagues visual artists. http://gulag.si/

Simon Macuh (1971, Celje) has finished The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (academic sculptor) and The Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana (BA in Philosophy). He is self-employed in culture. He works in the areas of performans, sculpting, video, and in the interactions between theory and practice. Formally and in terms of the content, he explores social relations, by focusing especially on the work in groups and connecting with both individuals and groups. He sees his work as a creation of the social sculpture, individually and temporarily manifesting itself in public and private spaces. He works towards inscribing the interconnections between his life and work in various media, with which he experiments.

Co-production: Zavod GULAG

Co-organization: Menza pri koritu

After the performance:
concert Women’s Section of Theremidi Orchestra (SLO)
concert Maneki Nekoč (AT)
DJ and VJ programme Revoltaža Female’s’Cream (SLO)

Entrance fee for the whole evening: 5 €.

Co-organization: Menza pri koritu

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