Tadej Pogačar

Tadej Pogačar, an artist, curator and educator, was born in 1960 in Slovenia. He studied art history, ethnology and fine art at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and graduated in painting from the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, where he also completed his postgraduate studies (1990). From 1994 to 1999, he was the editor in chief of M’ARS magazine (published by the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana), one of the leading publications on contemporary art in Central Europe. From 2001 to 2004, he taught at the SCCA Centre for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana in the Programme for Curators of Contemporary Arts.

Pogačar is the founder and director of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, a virtual organization established in 1993 that may be described as a conceptual mobile entity that establishes specific interrelationships with a variety of subjects, organizations, institutions, social groups, and symbolic networks. As a parallel institution, it serves as a critical model for analysing systems and the institutions within them and as a framework for introducing alternative forms of communication and establishing new connections. The P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum has evolved its own operational strategy: “New Parasitism”, and since 1993, has published the magazine Journal for Anthropology and New Parasitism.

He is also the founder and managing director of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute (established in 1998), a nonprofit cultural institution that operates the P74 Centre and Gallery and the KAPSULA bookshop/project space. The P74 Gallery is the leading independent gallery for contemporary art in Ljubljana. Its mission is to foster the exchange of new ideas and promote innovative and challenging models in contemporary art and culture both locally and internationally. In the last fifteen years its programs have focused on the support, presentation, study, and promotion of contemporary visual art, performance, time-related art, and publishing. In 2004, P74 initiated an exhibition and education program aimed at presenting and promoting artist books. Since its founding, P74 has organized numerous discursive research projects and workshops, which serve as the basis of its programme. These include Art in the Public Space, Parallel Economies, Public Phenomena, Ready to Change, Local Cartographies, Reality Log / Environmental Scan, and The Renaming Machine.

Pogačar has exhibited widely, most recently at the Gallery for Contemporary Art  in Leipzig (2012), the ZKM – Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (2011–2012), the Vojvodina Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad (2011), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana (2011), as well as at biennials in São Paulo, Venice, Istanbul, Prague, and Tirana, and at Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam. He has also had exhibitions at the MUMOK in Vienna (2009), the San Francisco Art Institute (2007), the NGBK in Berlin (2007), the Stedelijk Museum (2004), the Central House of Artists in Moscow, and the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil in Mexico City.

His video works have been shown at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, the 3rd San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival, APEX in New York, the 16 Beaver Group in New York, the Model Arts and Nilland Gallery in Sligo, Ireland, the A+A Gallery in Venice, ACF in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.

He has edited a number of books published by the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute in Ljubljana: P74 Center and Gallery: The First Eight Years (2005);  Dalibor Martinis: October Re-evaluation (2007);  Old Masters (2011), and CODE:RED (2011).  He has also published several artist books: Home Stories (1999), Tales of Two Cities (2000), CODE:RED (Onestar Press, Paris, 2004), Twenty Palm Trees of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2009), Twenty-Eight Cakes (2009), P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Public Sculpture (2010), Various (Small) Pieces of Trash (2010), and Tito times Thirty (naked) (2010).

He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and residencies, including the Jakopič Prize, Slovenia’s main national award for visual art (2009), the Shrinking Cities grant (Leipzig, 2004), the Franklin Furnace Grant for Performance Art (New York, 2001), the AIR_port residential program Forum Stadtpark in Graz (2003), and an Austrian Cultural Forum residency in London (2003).

Project Description

Tadej Pogačar, working with a group of artists/students and scholars, will form a work group that will research and reconstruct the project György Kepes prepared for the United States presentation at the São Paulo Biennial in 1969, which has been described as “one of the CAVS’ most attention-getting efforts.” The research includes the analysis of various forms of data, such as documents, texts, conversations, observations, and visual media, as well as various scholarly research methods, such as diagrams, questionnaires, field work, documentary video, recorded interviews, theoretical and historical criticism, etc. The researchers are analyzing the project through the discourses of art, history, politics, anthropology, architecture, and contemporary cultural studies. Its findings will serve as the basis for the preparation and realization of the (documentary) reconstruction of the project. This will be presented through a public event (an  installation, and conference), an online archive, and a printed publication (an artist book).