For the beginning of the exhibition season in the Kula Gallery, the project of the Ljubljana gallery DobraVaga OFF THE HOOK: Likely To Happen is coming to Belgrade’s public.
OFF THE HOOK is an annual exhibition project by the DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana, which aims to present the plentiful production of young Slovenia-based artists in the international space. After exhibitions in Berlin, Budapest, Vienna and online, the fifth edition of the project was to take place in Belgrade in December 2021 with the exhibition titled Likely to Happen. Due to well-known circumstances, the exhibition has been postponed to April 2022, with the possibility of its realisation again becoming the subject of speculation: It will most likely happen.
It is probability and potential that the upcoming exhibition addresses by juxtaposing the different practices of young artists who share an interest in the everyday, an attention to materiality and an investigation of the narratives that a work of art can establish. In doing so, artists Lene Lekše, Ana Likar, Mia Paller, Lea Topolovec, Nežka Zamar and Matic Pandel use site-specific strategies and establish an imaginative, speculative space between fiction and reality in their works. As a starting point for the artistic process, they often use documentation in their works, transforming it in such a way as to create complex fictional worlds or offer a different reading of actual reality. Rather than expressing bold statements, they are interested in small gestures, phenomena and traces that might be minute and unrecognizable in the mass of everyday things.
The works of art arrayed in the exhibition insist on their potential, act as portals to other points in space and time, make statements about the position they occupy in the exhibition, or reflect on their own placement in the art institution. Here, the site of the institution is understood primarily in a discursive sense, as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchanges and cultural debates, and does not represent merely the physical space of the gallery. As such, it is not pre-existing, but is only produced through the works (as content) and then affirmed through coincidence with already existing systems and formats. The exhibition therefore tries to reflect on the conditions of its own production and the contexts in which it places itself and which it produces, looking to the future and reflecting on the past.
artists Lene Lekše, Ana Likar, Mia Paller, Lea Topolovec, Nežka Zamar and Matic Pandel use site-specific strategies and establish an imaginative, speculative space between fiction and reality in their works.
