Output details

An idea for living: realism and reality in contemporary art in Slovenia. U3 – 6th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia

The U3 exhibition is the major national triennial exhibition of contemporary art in Slovenia. It is organised by the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art (Moderna Galerija) based in Ljubljana. For the sixth edition of the triennial, Esche was invited to curate the exhibition and select works from artists around the country. The process involved extensive research visits to the main cities of Slovenia and discussions with artists and curators. From this research Esche built a comprehensive knowledge of the post-1991 developments of art in independent Slovenia and their relationship to the strong presence of Slovene art in former Yugoslavia.

As the first exhibition in the refurbished National Museum building, Esche was able to also draw on works from the Moderna Galerija’s collection to build an exhibition that connected the realism of the 1930s–1950s with current artistic practice. The project, titled ‘An Idea for Living: Realism and Reality in Contemporary Art in Slovenia’, continued Esche’s research into the means by which the rich history of historic European modernism can be understood in contemporary times and referred directly to the history of former Yugoslavia and its modernist artistic identity.

A conference at the end of the exhibition focused on these issues and a programme of lectures by the Workers and Punks University, based in Ljubljana, analysed the artistic legacies of the Partisan period in Yugoslavia and the period of the Federal Socialist Republic. The result of this collaboration was recorded in the catalogue and further recognised in an interview between Zdenka Badovinac and Esche in a recent Contemporary Arts Society publication What’s Next? edited by Lucy Byatt and Charlotte Troy. The research also fed into a subsequent project in Prishtinë, Kosovo in 2011.