27 November until 4 December, 2015. Nova Gorica City Gallery
Curated by Igor Štromajer
This year’s festival continues the collaboration with the School of Art of the University of Nova Gorica and the Gorizia-based Lucide. With 57 contributing artists, we invite you to an exhibition taking place in three venues – Nova Gorica City Gallery, Nova Gorica School of Art and the Gorizia Chamber of Commerce.
Things are not subordinated to people, artists, they are more than just a device of expression or a tool, once we understand them beyond their basic function, they become a “surface for semantic projection”, to quote the theoretician Martina Ruhsam, who points out that if objects, non-human entities in the traditional forms of art, were once subordinated to the artist’s expression, they can exist entirely autonomously in a non-anthropocentric conception of the world. The fact that agency is not a human privilege is also suggested by object-oriented ontology, new materialism and speculative realism, even though we regard them strictly from a critical standpoint. Or in the words of French writer and philosopher Tristan Garcia, people, compared to objects and things, are not an exception. A thing is everything, no matter how big or small, how true or wrong, how human or nonhuman it may be. As the thing is always in something other than itself, it can never be itself, argues Martina Ruhsam, quoting Garcia: “… the self is precisely what we must abandon here, so that there is something and a world. Nothing is in itself. Everything is outside itself. No-matter-what is something, is in something other than itself. A difference is maintained between that which is in the thing and that in which the thing is.”
Related media:
