Ausstellung Laibach Kunst - Perspektive 1980 - 2011

Press Conference: Wednesday, 23 February at 11.00
Opening: Thursday, 24 February at 19.00
Ends: April 17th 2011


Laibach and Umetnostna Galerija Maribor (UGM) organised the exhibition Ausstellung Laibach Kunst – Perspectives 2011 which had opened on February 24th, 2011.

The exhibtion was dedicated to Janez Knez who had passed away on 20th February 2011.

Various notes from the organisers

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. The majority of works were not featured in last year's exhibitions at MGCL Ljubljana and Delavski Dom Trbovlje. A new installation titled 'Artist Perspective' was created specially for this exhibition. This is the biggest Laibach Kunst exhibition in Slovenia to date.



     



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 globalized world which continues to be affected by modernity’s conceptions the state, the individual, mass culture, art, and politics.







The exhibition 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 is co-curated by Claudia Richter and coordinated by Simona Vidmar.



























     











All photos by Toma Bacic