In her work, artist Nina Goropečnik discusses the relationship between the private and the public, and explores the limits of performance art and its documentation. In the exhibition which is not (yet) visible, she presents the traces of performative actions she carried out in Iceland, which were intended for one person at a time. In a public environment, she told a very personal story she had never told anyone to a viewer she invited to take photographs during the event. She told the story in Slovenian, a language that those present did not understand.
The performed actions do not place the content of the story or the artist’s confession at the forefront. The intimate story stirs up the everyday context only seemingly. The act of disclosing a secret is immediately shown to be an act of concealment, and the inaccessible content in a foreign language is irrelevant, as to the viewers at the time, the spoken words remain and operate at the level of sound.
The artist’s performances complicate the moment when something becomes visible, which is key both for establishing a piece of art and for the medium of the exhibition the work is later transferred to. The project, which conceals more than it reveals, places the viewer of the exhibition at a distance, where she is left to her own speculation and associations. The original event is available to her only through the subjective and unreliable decisions of the original viewers and their memories – through photographs taken during the performances and through descriptions of the event (subsequently obtained for this exhibition), which we can hear in the space. At the exhibition, a computer-generated voice speaks words, memories of the performances, now written about the event by the viewers, in their native languages. The event documentation is not a reliable source of information and deepens the inaccessibility of the piece. In its entirety, the moment that has already passed is available only to the author.
Nina Goropečnik (1993) graduated in 2017 from Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana, where she is currently enrolled in post-graduate studies. She is part of a younger generation of artists who work in the field of performance art. She has held a solo exhibition at the DLUL Gallery (Ljubljana, 2020) and participated in several group exhibitions, including at the Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri Gallery (Hjalteyri, Iceland, 2018), Layer House (Kranj, Slovenia, 2018) and DA! Festival (Zagreb, Croatia, 2017). In 2019, her artistic work was featured at the P74 Gallery as part of the My Story project. Since the same year, she is a member of the Gallery 7:069 collective, which focuses on presenting younger student production.
Organization: Kino Šiška
Free entry.
