Tadej Pogacar & P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.

From 18 April to 12 May P74 Center and Gallery, and Skuc Gallery will hold an exhibition entitled TADEJ POGAČAR & P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art: From the Street, which features a comprehensive overview of public art projects, a spatial construction, an archival presentation of street economies, and a new board game. The common denominator of the installations is social interaction, exchange in public space, and open collaboration based on dialogue and teamwork.

The exhibition TADEJ POGAČAR & P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art: From the Street includes a large-scale installation, photo and video documentation of urban actions, archives, and a board game.

The video installation Temporary Autonomous Territory II Mexico City documents street action, which was organised as part of the Ex Teresa Arte Actual festival in Mexico City. The event focused on topical heritage of the situationist movement of the 1960s. The Lampadedromia PR04 project, carried out in 2004 in Puerto Rico thematised the relationship between politics and sport. It featured an alternative relay run, and the bearing of the Olympic torch through the cities of San Juan in Rincon. The event was organised by Equipo Terrestre (Deidre Hoguet, Peter Walsh, Tadej Pogačar), in collaboration with the local inhabitants of both cities.

The MonApoly game remodels the most famous capitalist game. Visually, it follows the Monopoly, but the contents are completely new. While playing, the players acquire new information on the global sex industry, activist organisations, organised crime gangs, etc. MonApoly is the new cartography of sex work and modern slave trade. Instead of accumulating capital, it explains to the players the geopolitics of sex work in the era of global capitalism.

In 1993 Tadej Pogačar founded P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art (PMCA), a virtual, parallel institution, which establishes interspecific relationships with various subjects, the society, institutions, social groups and symbolic networks. The interventions and projects, organised by PMCA, are marked by critical self-reflection, analysis, experimentation and trans-disciplinary approach. The fact that not only collage techniques, paradoxes, and displacements and replacements, but also of irony and self-irony are used, indicates an affinity with movements such as Dada, Fluxus or Situacionism. By using play and sometimes even by taking advantage of coincidence, Pogačar succeeds in turning our attention to the hidden and repressed side of the established narratives.

The interest of Tadej Pogačar and PMCA in the street arises from a general interest in the modern metropolis, its structures, networks, and the processes which generate an invisible outline of the city, and its inherent social relations. The P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum is interested not only in parasitism and “para-sites,” but also in parallel systems; the street is, above all, a place where such parallel economies co-exist and interact with one another and with socially recognised systems. Parallel economies are interesting as a possible means of survival outside established frameworks, and also as the indicators of potential alternative social and economic structures. In this sense, the social visibility of different groups and the social acceptability of different parallel economies are integral parts of social discipline and control, and this is what ultimately interests Pogačar. In the mid-1990s Pogačar organised a public project entitled Kings of the Street, which included collaboration with the homeless in Ljubljana, Stockholm, and Berlin, and which examined the models of parallel economies. With his transdisciplinary, collaborative project CODE:RED, which has been carried out since 1999/2000, and which has been researching the self-management of urban minorities, struggle of sex workers for their rights, and global trade with people, he expanded the parallel economies theme.

About the Artist Tadej Pogačar (1960) is an artist, curator and the founding director of the P. A. R. A. S. I. T. E. Museum of Contemporary Art. His most recent project involves collaboration with urban social minorities, use of various media, activism, and intervention in the public space. He exhibited at the 49th Venice Biennial (2001); 3rd Prague Biennial, 3rd Tirana Biennial (2005), 27th Sao Paulo Biennial (forthcoming); Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; Moderna Musset, Stockholm; ZKM Karlsruhe; NOVA Gallery, Zagreb; Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Central house of Artist in Moscow; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; and Jyvaeskylae Art Museum, Finland. He received the Franklin Furnace Grant for performance in 2001, and a working scholarship for the Shrinking Cities project, Leipzig in 2004.

Brochure and Exhibition Catalogue A new issue of the Journal For Anthropology and New Parasitism magazine entitled Lampadedromia, Puerto Rico 04. (published by P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art) will accompany the opening of the exhibition. In the autumn or winter 2006 an exhaustive catalogue, presenting the work of Tadej Pogačar in the last decade, will be published. The catalogue will include contributions by Zdenka Badovinac, Igor Zabel, Gregor Podnar, Tadej Pogačar, and an interview with the artist Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Lectures Skuc Gallery, Thursday, 4 May, 2006, 7 p.m. Jaka Repič, The Role of Informal Economy in Migration Processes in Spain

Skuc Gallery, Tuesday, 8 May, 2006, 7 p.m. Marjan Hočevar, Postmodern Urban Landscapes

Tadej Pogačar's project From the Street is part of a years-long multidisciplinary collaborative Street Economies project by the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery in Zagreb, and P74 Center and Gallery in Ljubljana. It explores the grey economy phenomenon, with special emphasis on the area of South-Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

P74 Center and Gallery Prusnikova 74, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

The exhibition is supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and the Municipality of Ljubljana.

Pressetext

Tadej Pogacar & P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art
From the Street
P74 Center and Gallery, Skuc Gallery