EXHIBITIONS

Ljubljana, 1955, Galerija Jakopič, Ljubljana
08 August 2015 - 03 December 2015

Ljubljana, 1955, 2015
Interpretation, di-cut vinyl
Dimensions variable

Ljubljana, 1955, Galerija Jakopič, Ljubljana
a part of '31st Biennial of Graphic Arts: Over you/you', curated by Nicola Lees

For the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, artist Giles Round has been invited to research and reinterpret the exhibition’s history. Inaugurated in 1955 in Yugoslavia, the Ljubljana Biennial was not only one of the world’s first biennials, but also the first graphic arts biennial to encompass all printmaking techniques. Titled after the city and the year of first exhibition, Round’s exhibition presents archived works from the collections of MGLC and Moderna Galerija dating from 1955 to 1999, during which the biennial operated using an open submission format.

For Ljubljana, 1955, Round has combined his interest in appropriation and exhibition design to adapt certain display traditions common to public exhibitions. Interpretation panels, title graphics, exhibition design, as well as particular styles of placing and hanging works, are conventions that the artist intervenes with, in an atypical fashion. The space is broken up by a soft architecture of cotton curtains printed with a series of photographs of a technical team preparing the 1969 edition of the biennial. These images, found by Round in the Moderna Galerija photographic archive, are the only known photographs that picture of the people responsible for the working on the exhibition, and depict technicians laying out and sorting through selected prints, placing them between glass panels. In front of these enlarged halftone images, a selection of graphic prints from the MGLC and Moderna Galerija collections float, suspended by wires from aluminium tracks.

In a work of multiple images and reflections, Round took a new photograph of an archival photograph: a documentation shot of the 1965 Biennial exhibition. Round’s hand, in a white cotton conservation glove, is seen at the periphery of the image pressing down the curling paper of the gloss photograph, in which the artist’s reflection is caught. Within the original image, the reflection of the photographer documenting the 1965 exhibition is also captured, accidentally, in the glass of a framed print. This image appears both as a photographic print and again in a paler screen print, semi-obliterated by a distorted facsimile of the Rauschenberg lithograph, Accident (1963), which captures a break in the stone used to make the print, and which won first prize in the 1963 Ljubljana Biennial.

Another appropriated work appears in You know the old story… I can’t tell you again!!! (2015), which is fly-posted across walls of both Galerija Jakopic and Moderna Galerija. The blueback posters of a library scan, present a work from 1975 that has been manipulated, misappropriated and reproduced in the wrong format. Again a lithograph is remade as a heavily pixelated halftone colour separation. "You know the old story…" is replaced with the frustrated exclamation: "I can’t tell you again!!!"
Throughout Ljubljana, 1955, conventional wayfinding signage is reconfigured as an audio work. The audience is ushered through the exhibition by the siren like singing of Cally Spooner’s The Overall Oooh (2013-4). Dislodged from the soundtrack of a larger live work, The Overall Oooh is both a soft persuasion tool and a coercive crowd-control device that sits somewhere between the sensually poetic and heavily managerial, using gentle slopes, elegant harmonies, bureaucratic stoppages and pointlessly aggressive pans to pull listeners in several directions and nowhere at all.

Works by: Giles Round and Cally Spooner

Moderna Galerija Collection: Karel Appel, Jean-Michel Atlan, Roger Bissière, Victor Brauner, Beverloo Guillaume Corneille, Marcel Fiorini, Léon Gischia, Jean-Jacques de Grave, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Roberto Matta, Jean Le Moal, Giorgio Morandi, Gino Severini, Gustave Singier, Zora Staack, Victor Vasarely, Emilio Vedova

MGLC Collection: Ay-O, Getulio Alviani, Max Bill, Elaine Breiger, Danilo Jejčič, Andrej Jemec, Kimura Kosuke, Zdeněk Kučera, Lojze Logar, Peter Matthews, Ivan Picelj, Arthur Luiz Piza, France Rotar, Lojze Spacal, Tinca Stegovec, Emilio Vedova, Edvard Zajec, Karel Zelenko

Archival photography courtesy Moderna Galerija Photo Archive

28 August 2015 – 03 December 2015
OPEN: Tuesday – Sunday 10am-6pm

Galerija Jakopič
Slovenska cesta 9
1000 Ljubljana

Works courtesy the artists, Moderna Galerija and MGLC
Installation photography: Jaka Babnik

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EXHIBITIONS

Ljubljana, 1955, Galerija Jakopič, Ljubljana 08 August 2015 - 03 December 2015

Ljubljana, 1955, Galerija Jakopič, Ljubljana
08 August 2015 - 03 December 2015