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Gifts are received and donated
Description of the process:
The project „GIFTS“(„DARILA“)is basically immaterial. It is a completely material world for the visitors with thousands of objects – but I do not produce anything new. Gifts varying in numbers (collected before) travel from gallery to gallery directly (I myself have no contact with them). The objects are available to the visitors and in this way I wish to contribute the smaller production of new material objects.
The project is a process of exchanging gifts among visitors from different towns in Slovenia and in Europe. The exhibition consists of two parts:
- GIFTS – desired and redundant, author Milena Kosec, carrier contemporary artist
- DESETNICA, author sculptress Anja Šmajdek.
Exhibition is time and side specific in each gallery.
In the first part of project people are invited to donate presents for exhibition. The presents are things which they already have and don’t need or want anymore. They may exchange their presents with the exhibited presents, just add or take presents from the exhibition. On the first day of the exhibition I exchange the exhibited gifts with the visitors. Up until now the collected gifts are objects of any kind.
For the realisation of the whole process it is very important that local people are invited to participate in the process. The local public media publicizes the explanation (radio, newspaper, TV).
Since the process of exchanging gifts is repeated from town to town the gifts became the bearers of interesting information about the culture of the town’s people and the period.
I am critical about the donation gifts if they are donated only for the sake of donating. We all wish to receive presents. But what is really worth wishing for today, what we really need, what we can give to someone without burdening them in any way.
In the second part of the exhibition I have invited my friend Anja Šmajdek with her sculpture and project DESETNICA from year 1995 in which she deals with donation from a different point of view. Anja Šmajdek invited visitors to take a small part of her sculpture home with them. So on one hand visitors receive a gift and on another hand they help to give a new shape to the sculpture DESETNICA. According to the old Slovenian folk tale DESETNICA travels around the country.
So DESETNICA is a variation of the basic theme of the exhibition and re-establishes the now already classical question about artefacts and their true value. This question can be transposed to the whole exhibition.
In the process ‘ GIFTS – we are receiving and donating’ the gallery’s role of institutional mediator is emphasised and underlined. From the gallery I expect: organization, representation, theoretical and financial support, mediation and documentation.
On the one hand the whole exhibition emphasizes social questions abut the mutual distribution of presents in our society and on the another hand the questions of donating art to society, the status of the artist and his work of art, the location of the art and the role of the gallery institution.
By inviting my friend to participate in the exhibition I wish to emphasis the mutual influences of authors and their works of art. Collaboration expands the concept of the exhibition and views it from a different angle creating a new meaning as well as a new whole. Its travels add new dimensions and context.
foto Boštjan Pucelj