The year has come around again and the festive and joyful month of December has just begun. In Piran Coastal Galleries, we will mark its arrival with a variety of new events and numerous opportunities for pleasant and entertaining gatherings. This is the month when a very important opening of the new exhibition will take place at the Piran City Gallery in a celebratory atmosphere.
The exhibition of MARJETICA POTRČ entitled WATER AND LAND in the Piran City Gallery will be opened on Saturday, December 17, 2022, at 6 p.m. Marjetica Potrč is a world-renowned multidisciplinary artist and architect who developed her expression at the intersection of visual art, architecture, ecology and anthropology. She emphasizes the importance of individual and community empowerment, problem-solving tools and strategies for the future that go beyond the neoliberal consensus and bear witness to the failures of modernism. Her work has been presented at some of the most important manifestations and exhibitions of contemporary art, such as the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Barbican Gallery in London, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, NTU- Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore and MAXXI- the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2000 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum in New York for achievements in contemporary art.
In Piran, Marjetica Potrč will present the exhibition project Water and Land, which was produced by the Piran Coastal Galleries, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and in collaboration with Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin. It includes visual essays and a diagram, with which the artist draws attention to the necessity of coexistence and cooperation between people and nature. Two visual essays and diagrams were created for the Biennale of Sidney in the spring of 2022 and deal with the issue of the rights of two watercourses, the Soča River in Slovenia and the Lachlan River in Australia. The third visual essay and diagram, which will also be depicted in the large mural in the Piran City Gallery, refer to the current pressing issues of Piran and its Istrian hinterland. The drawings were created after several months of research, in conversations with the inhabitants of Piran and with the help of the translator Julija Potrč Šavli in creating the verses. More about the exhibition project at the link…
The Water and Land exhibition will be enriched by a diverse accompanying program. Throughout the exhibition and even before it, creative workshops organized by the curator and pedagogue Ana Papež will take place in the Piran Coastal Galleries, which will draw attention to the importance of nature for the life of all living and non-living creatures and will strive to connect it to the title of the Water and Land exhibition. Marjetica Potrč, in cooperation with Romana Kačič (Abakkum, Institute for Landscape, Culture and Art Piran) and the Piran Local Community, with the support of PCG, will also prepare four intergenerational workshops for the restoration of the path between gardens and olive groves of Piran, entitled “Pot Štorta/ Štorta Path". Citizens and aficionados of environmental topics alike are invited and will be joined by students of the University of Primorska (under the mentorship of Assoc. Dr. Boštjan Bugarič and Assoc. Dr. Polonca Lovšin). The first workshop already took place on Friday, November 25, 2022, as a side event of PiDA 2022. More about the next “Štorta Path" workshops at the link…
Before that, in the first week of December, we will organize a few very interesting events. On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 5 p.m., you can participate in the interview with the authors of the recently opened exhibition MARINA GRŽINIĆ & AINA ŠMID entitled DISSIDENT HISTORIES. The authors present themselves for the first time in the Piran Coastal Galleries, with rich and diverse contents. On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 4 p.m., a guided tour with the artist Marina Gržinić and researcher Jovita Pristovšek will take place after the exhibition. Meetings with the authors of the project are an extraordinary opportunity to learn about their decades-long joint creative journey and their plans for the future.
On Friday, December 9, 2022, two completely different events will take place. The first one is intended primarily for young people and will come to life in the joint online promotion campaign #naprejvpreteklost (#forwardintothepast), organized by the Service for Movable Heritage and Museums at the National Museum of Slovenia in cooperation with the Slovenian Museum Association.
The Piran Coastal Galleries are joining the campaign with an interesting novelty: a new and fresh interactive game for young people entitled A WALK WITH THE MUSE MEDUSA, which will also be available on the PCG website. It was designed by the PCG curator and pedagogue Ana Papež based on the character of Medusa. In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of the three Gorgon sisters, a terrible monster with live snake hair and special powers. Because Medusa's head is also the symbol of the Piran Coastal Galleries, the character of the Muse Medusa takes the children on an interactive walk through a part of the PCG's very rich fund of museum collections and introduces them to a selection of artworks. With this special digital project, which is supported by the Ministry of Culture, we at the PCG want to demonstrate that the museum digital platforms represent an interesting, pleasant and safe place for learning and entertainment. The game is intended for different age groups and contains puzzles of different difficulty levels, in three languages (Slovenian, Italian and English). More on the link …
The second event is intended for adults and professional audiences. On Friday, December 9, 2022, at 12 a.m., the Herman Pečarič Gallery in Piran will host the presentation of a new book, the autobiography of the renowned art critic ALEKSANDER BASSIN, entitled THE OUTLINE OF MY TIME. As has been written by the Slovene Society (Slovenska matica): “The book from the collection Memories and Meetings is both a luxurious memoir and a rich historical document about the art and culture of the 20th century…". Slovene Society recently published the book with the support of the Slovenian Book Agency (JAK), the Museum and Galleries of the City of Ljubljana (MGML) and BTC d. d. company. The author and his work will be presented by Ignacija Fridl Jarc.
Before the end of the year, we would like to warmly invite you to also visit our other current exhibitions. The documentary exhibition PIRANESI 30: 30 YEARS OF THE PIRANESI MAGAZINE is on display at the Herman Pečarič Gallery until January 20, 2023. The first Central European architectural magazine for spatial culture has been highlighting high-quality past and contemporary architectural productions from the Central European area in its printed edition for three decades.
At Monfort Gallery in Portorož, you can see as many as two international exhibitions until December 30, 2022. Set up in a wooden hall part of Monfort, there is the central architectural exhibition of the 39th Piran Days of Architecture PIRANESI 2023, which presents the selected and awarded architectural projects of this year's meeting. In the gallery part of Monfort, however, there is a group exhibition of students of art academies and university programs for visual arts from Venice, Vienna, Ljubljana and Koper entitled NEXT GENERATION. It offers us an insight into the thought process of the up-and-coming generation of authors, who explore their own expression in the field of distinct media multifacetedness and in an unburdened way question the meaning of visual creation in today's turbulent era.
Finally, we would like to draw your attention to the SPEKULA 2023 exhibition, which is also on display at the moment at the Meduza Gallery in Koper until December 30, 2022.
We invite you to join us in celebrating this magical month and let's toast to yesterday's achievements and tomorrow's bright future, together!
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