This year, the Piran Coastal Galleries have also announced a public call Open Door with the aim of democratically including new artistic productions and alternative contemporary projects in the field of visual art of the coastal area in the galleries’ program and to enable their presentation in a public institution such as the Piran Coastal Galleries. The public call ended in the spring, when the jury of experts (dr. Martina Vovk, IED of the Modern Gallery Ljubljana, Mara Ambrožič Verderber, director of the Piran Coastal Galleries, dr. Majda Božeglav Japelj, PCG’s curator and museum councilor, Ana Papež, PCG’s curator-pedagogue, and Tatjana Sirk, PCG’s curator and museum consultant) reviewed and evaluated 34 submitted projects according to the previously announced criteria. Four were shortlisted, and among them two authors were selected for the exhibition at the PCG: Nežka Zamar, an interdisciplinary artist of the younger generation, and Hannes Zebedin, an Austrian academic sculptor who lives and creates in the Slovenian Karst. The two exhibitions will be the first to be realized in the PCG’s 2024 program year.
Nežka Zamar is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2013. She continued her visual arts studies at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her creativity focuses on questioning and moving the boundaries of identity and individuality of language, expanding the liminal space between materiality and concept. Her research-informed subjects are presented through a variety of artistic media, often combined into spatial installations and projects specific to the location in which they are placed. Her works arise from complex relationships between subjects, which manifest as the material of her objects and the objects of her work. Since 2012, she has participated in many residencies, art debates and projects, such as the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and a public intervention and book presentation at the Mediterranea Young Artists Biennale. Over the years, she has presented her work at international group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia, Italy, Serbia and the USA.
Hannes Zebedin (1976, Lienz, Austria) studied economics and political science at the University of Vienna between 1998 and 2004, and performance sculpture and installation at the Academy of Fine Arts from 2003 to 2008, also in Vienna. He lives and works in Sela, a village in the Karst region of Slovenia. As an artist, he studied, worked and lived in major cities, such as Vienna, Brussels and Ciudad de Mexico. In 2015, he returned to the way of life of his childhood and youth – to life in the village. This decision was of political nature. He is passionate about some of the central themes of the so-called art world, such as criticisms of capitalism, racism, feminism and colonialism; but above all, he deals with topics such as classicism and rurality in the sense of cultural workers being poorly paid and not being able to survive from practicing their profession alone. For the last 15 years, he has been exhibiting independently and at group exhibitions in Europe and South America.
HANNES ZEBEDIN: MARKERS, BURNT SQUARE, MONOCHROME PROTEST.
Explanation of the jury:
The project stands out according to all the mentioned criteria and, in accordance with the program strategy of the institute, which is also dedicated representing foreign artists, it has been included in the annual program of the Piran Coastal Galleries. The Austrian artist who lives in the Karst region of Slovenia reflects on the complexity of the natural and social environment in which he lives and addresses it through various artistic strategies- – reacts to the environmental crisis, which is drastically manifested in his living environment (summer fires in the Karst region) and reflects the current chaotic global socio-political moment as a consequence of past (missed) economic and political decisions (collapse of democratic standards during the war – Ukraine/ Russia), but at the same time he also places his own artistic practice in the context of the history of the avant-garde current of art (the mythology of Malevich’s black square). With such a proposal, he presents an artistic project that responds in an up-to-date and critical manner to the current modern reality in a wide spectrum of issues, which are fundamentally linked by ecological concerns; the latter undoubtedly positions him as a critical and original author.
NEŽKA ZAMAR: (UN)TRUSTED SOURCE, A SERIES OF INVISIBLE PRACTICE.
Explanation of the jury:
The project of the young coastal artist stands out according to all the mentioned criteria and is compatible with the institute’s program strategy, which supports young creators, including those educated abroad. It is therefore meaningfully included in the annual program of the Piran Coastal Galleries. The artist works at the intersection of visual-performative contemporary art practices, which define her work as fundamentally conceptual. In individual projects, she deals in different ways with the ontology of the work of art, with its interpretation, the possibility of representation and the lack of it, with the question of ready-made as a concept and the status of the originality of the work in the age of technical reproducibility, which in modern times is complicated not only by 3D printing- recreating objects, but also by the possibility of AI fictionalization. The proposal for Nežka Zamar’s exhibition concerns the complex nature of performance as living art and its key opposite – the absence of a performative act. In terms of content, it goes beyond mere questions of the aesthetics of the performance by anchoring them in the fundamental ethical dilemma of modernity – the question of the attitude towards the Other, in the specific case of Slovenian society’s hostility towards Muslim immigrants.
