Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Ljubljana

Coming this autumn, British artist Mark Leckey, recipient of the Turner Prize, will present an exhibition in Cukrarna Gallery's basement exhibition space. His work has been exhibited at international institutions of contemporary art, including Tate Britain, MoMA PS1, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Hammer Museum. Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) is a Turner Prize winning artist from the North West of Britain known for engaging with youth subculture (especially music), pop culture, and media history through his uniquely enchanted (or perhaps haunted) and highly biographical lens as an outsider growing up in a fading working-class town. His work takes multifarious forms – video, sound, sculpture, performance, and image, often in combination – summoning an atmosphere that pervades the exhibition space: a palimpsest of place and of time, inhabited by talismanic objects and undead mediatised memories. His video work especially invokes and informs these spectral dimensions, often employing montage of found footage scavenged from the vast archives of YouTube, as with his breakthrough video artwork Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), composed of clips from UK’s underground rave scene, and further built upon with sculptural and animated interventions in the multi-generation spanning Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD (2015) – a self-described “exorcism”. Dream English Kid 1964–1999 A D is a 23-minute diachronic eclipse of sound, image, and sensibility starting with the year of the artist’s birth and culminating in the Time to Totality with collective visions at the turn of the millennium (also featuring seminal Liverpool performances by the Beatles and Joy Division). The work’s propulsion generates the sense that time is imploding, probing the consistency of self and memory through British culture and the media’s evolution from radio, television, and film to the internet. Simultaneously highly personal and generic, the work is an archaeological genealogy of the artist that coalesces into an enigmatic map. It also serves as an emblematic entry point into Leckey’s oeuvre, exploring of the power of images within an uncannily animated universe.

Eating Back is a project by artist Špela Petrič that examines the high-tech cultivation of tomatoes and cucumbers in order to explore how algorithmic infrastructures shape our bodies. Petrič uses the term ‘awkward intimacy’ to describe the relationships that arise between bodies and infrastructures as a result of consuming industrially produced food – a form of intimacy based on long-standing dependence on systems whose inner workings usually remain hidden, rather than on emotions or consent. For this exhibition, Petrič draws on a series of performative interventions that she conducted in the greenhouses of Westland, a municipality in the Netherlands...