Kunstraum Lakeside, May 12 to July 14

This exhibition encompasses the most significant body of works by the Slovenian artists  Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid developed over 35 years. Highly performative in the sense of producing the specific impact in current socio-political reality, their mode of production is prompted by a  sharp and accurate sense of the contemporary context, in the way that each of their works  is  producing  a specific account of what we will call radical contemporaneity. This means that not only have they been working with  boiling political questions, but they have kept dealing with them as they are happening, always taking the risk to provide the analyses of traumatic presents, conscious of historic momentum yet with a  clear understanding of the processes of historicization.

Gržinić and  Šmid showed the historical process underlying the transition from socialism to postocialism to turbo-capitalism (via turbo-fascism), analyzed the shifts introduced by new media technologies, and exposed the conditions of  contemporary global necrocapitalism, giving a harsh critique of discrimination, racism, and fascism in Europe today. In this regard their opus obtains a historical position in terms of artistic, cultural and political questioning and as a critique of the construction and deconstruction of the political project of former Eastern Europe in relation to the so called “former West”, as well as this testifies of their understanding of the contemporary relations of segregation and exploitation in Europe, especially in terms of class, race and gender. Following this trait while retrospective in its nature, the exhibition obtains a format of accumulated political histories in order to offer a reading of the dystopian present and to think about a possible future.

Curator: Aneta Stojnić