You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition on Thursday, March 11, at 7 pm at the Mestna galerija Ljubljana.

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At the present, when virtually all institutions operating in the sphere of culture are primarily concerned with statistics about the numbers of their visitors, the strategies and marketing tactics to increase these numbers and attract more and more sponsors at the same time, it has become almost obsolete to speak of the “subjects” who make up these numbers, that is, the visitors to the various cultural and artistic events - the museum public.

Until recently, focus was placed on the progressive idea that an art institution should relate to its broader social sphere. This concept was largely based on the humanist-positivist notion of society as multicultural, where the differences between people disappear or are “neutralized” precisely in the so-called open spaces. Such strategies included, on the one hand, participatory and socially engaged projects, various practices of opening the museums and galleries to the “other publics” (marginalized groups, the underprivileged, minorities, etc.), and on the other hand, programs that focused primarily on entertainment and similar themes. The idea was therefore to create new publics, some kind of “cloakroom communities,”1 which would, through these kinds of art projects, create, for the duration of the spectacle, the idea of a temporary community. This related to both the idea of opening up the museum spaces and the demand for increasing the number of visitors.

One of the “missions” of a progressive art institution today is therefore to create new communication networks, both within its local environment and in a broader sphere, with other networks in what is called “transversal linkage.” This takes no predetermined form, but is constituted on the basis of events, various alliances or associations and temporary organizations, and relates, in its underlying idea, to the production of other subjectivities.

For this reason we are interested in the following:
What kind of strategies and dynamics of work involving several situations, institutions, and discourses are not identified by or subject to these spaces? How can networking be set up in environments that are very specific? How can a new art institution establish itself in a given space? How can long-term associations with the local environment be established? How can the traps of multicultural exoticism be avoided?