EXHIBITION | Picture (a) City | MG+MSUMhttp://www.mg-lj.si/en/exhibitions/4066/exhibition-picture-a-city/Exhibition opening: 30. 1. 2025 at 8 PM
As many states follow the policies of their Western-centric ruling elites, in the process working to serve the interests of big business, we see cities transformed first and foremost into service platforms for the local economic powers that be. As a result, the public is losing its traditional leverage in the power structure, with civil society and the nongovernmental sector having to adjust to the dominance of the executive. This submission to private interests particularly degrades public space, both in terms of quality of space and environmental concerns. In recent years, this has become increasingly evident in peripheral European cities such as Ljubljana, where the city's inhabitants are nonetheless becoming ever more aware of the importance of the city as a framework for solving community-related issues. Rather than a space of sovereign and participatory decision-making on the public good, and of concern for the inhabitants’ welfare and interests, the city is turning into a backdrop, a set for some kind of parallel show. On the one hand we witness the staging of the city as a spectacle, the effect of across-the-board commodification, a mere picture of a city losing its basic functional elements. On the other hand, however, the city appears as the arena of imagination, vision, critical (re)presentation, and thinking. Picture (a) City confronts these two perspectives and offers a layered view of the social and spatial dynamics involved by including historical works from public and private collections and contemporary artistic and theoretical production.
The project brings together works by artists exploring the complexity of Ljubljana’s urban identity. In terms of theme, the works range from questioning local heritage and its role in our present context to highlighting environmental challenges and changes in the urban landscape. The artists deal with the relation between the memory of the space and its users, investigating traces of the past by mapping, archiving, or recontextualizing recognizable elements of the urban environment. They focus on the devastation of public spaces, the unexploited potential of the derelict, and the housing crisis as the key challenges of contemporary urban life.
The problem of gentrification is not new, and has been dealt with in numerous art projects. Locally, some such projects were also realized through their engagement with the systemic contradictions of the city’s cultural policies. Art has often been understood as a corrective to the loss of public space and the deleterious interference of big capital in urban life. But rather than seeing art merely as a solution in this context, we should perhaps try to understand it also as part of the problem. The exhibition aims to shed critical light on the changes in the use of urban space in Ljubljana in recent years, and presents, in an historical context, the key issues related to these changes: political geography, the housing crisis, (infra)structural violence, touristification, and gentrification on the one hand; and on the other, monuments, gardens, parks, natural features, and architectural and urbanistic heritage. The attitude to the heritage of socialism, however, often has the effect of working to erase the memory of that emancipatory and progressive period in our history, with the intent of disguising the current neoliberal authoritarian rule.
Are artists still inclined to favor individual action and clever subversions of limited scope over unionized solidarity, broader organization, and collective struggle? Do cultural institutions only exacerbate gentrification by alleviating some of its symptoms and effects, or can they be active also in terms of critically addressing or even eliminating its structural causes?
The goal of the exhibition is to highlight, critically and historically, the current problems created by the (mis)use of public space and the intensifying processes of gentrification. These are instances that carry a certain weight and a sense of articulation in our local context that require adequate institutional (self)critique. Moderna galerija has already staged a number of projects revolving around urban antagonisms, i.e., aspects of the city that are both present and invisible, marginalized and repressed. In this new context, these antagonisms have morphed into a brutal shrinking of public space carried out under the guise of ideology, becoming as a result invisible in completely new ways that our show aims to assess and expose.