[spectre] (fwd) Laibach at UGM - Maribor Art Gallery

[Andreas Broeckmann]

UGM l Maribor
Art Gallery

Ausstellung Laibach Kunst
Perspectives 1980-2011
24 February-17 April 2011


UGM l Maribor Art Gallery
Strossmayerjeva 6
Maribor, Slovenia

http://www.ugm.si


Curated by: Simona Vidmar, Claudia Richter and Laibach

The internationally renowned multidisciplinary collective and 
performance group Laibach are returning to the exhibition space! 
After 30 years of provocative activities and 'performances', 
Umetnostna galerija Maribor / Maribor Art Gallery presents a review 
of Laibach's visual artwork.

Since their formation in the early 1980s, Laibach have been engaged 
in an obsessive dialogue with the totalitarian ideologies of 
modernity and their relation to art. Far from being solely 
intelligible in the cultural context of 1980s Yugoslavia, their work 
still offers critical perspectives to a globalised world which 
continues to be affected by modernity's conceptions of the state, the 
individual, mass culture, art, and politics. Exhibition at UGM opens 
new perspectives on Laibach by highlighting their original beginnings 
as an'arts' collective. Although Laibach have repeatedly rejected 
this designation, their self-fashioning as 'engineers of the human 
soul' is telling of the degree to which all of Laibach's performances 
have sought to ironize and collapse clear-cut categories such as 
'art', 'politics', and 'popular culture'. Despite their influence on 
established artists, theorists and wider audiences, Laibach occupy an 
unframed position in the national and international art scene today. 
Their explorations into the world of popular music have gained them 
international renown. However, all of their performances have been 
radically self-reflexive in a way that responds to the functions 
ascribed to 'political art' in contemporary society, rather than to 
the consumerist and escapist nature of popular music. With their 
performances on diverse stages such as galleries, concert halls, 
opera houses, TV, internet, video, theatre, industrial power plants 
and shopping malls, Laibach represent a unique challenge to the 
categories established by Western art criticism.

The exhibition comprises twelve rooms presenting key stages of 
Laibach's work from the first decade of their career in the 1980s up 
to the present. The works on display include multi-media 
installations, oil paintings, photographs, graphic works, and film. A 
new installation created especially for this exhibition, titled 
Artist Perspective, will be on view. This is the biggest Laibach 
exhibition in Slovenia to date.

The exhibition is dedicated to the Slovene painter Janez Knez (1931-2011).

The exhibition is supported by Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia.