Conspire, but not too much please.

Janez 1

(from VVORK), Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša (three artists from Slovenia) have all changed their names to Janez Janša, the name of the current Slovenian prime minister. More at Aksioma from their inaugural initiation project.

mount triglav on mount triglav
Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav

According to VVORK and the Artists' press release, they were originally scheduled to perform their piece Signature Event Context, a work visible only in on the internet, with a special real time projection at the foyer of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. for the opening of transmediale.08 in Berlin, the curatorial premise for this year's event reads:
Under the theme CONSPIRE... transmediale.08 aims to hear from a broad range of artists, media activists and academics working within the realms of digital art and culture in ways which may be read as elaborating upon and challenging our understanding of collaborative and network practice. As such transmediale.08 looks to the cross-disciplinary tinkerers, utopian spelunkers, conspiratorial hoaxsters and stealth tacticians who question, subvert, undermine and bypass the unspoken rules, hidden codes of conduct and assumed truths entrenched within our information driven communication cultures and ideological belief structures.

By exploring subversive artistic methodologies and developing (counter-) conspiratorial strategies to uncover new forms of expression and digital discourse CONSPIRE... will attempt to enter the increasingly prevalent yet ambiguous worlds of network induced narratives, cryptic environments and speculative inquiry.
However, according to their press release, their participation was cancelled, so they enacted their performance at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a day earlier than scheduled
janez3

Full performance can be viewed here.

I'm mystified as to what the problem was, I'm not finding the actual performance offensive in the context of the memorial, (in fact I find it very poignant). The piece also has all that festival bumph illustrating that "diverse, rapidly emerging mobile communication structures, the Internet and the global media, are spawning questionable hierarchies, new structures of belief and mechanisms of derealisation" and plenty of bonus Derrida-blah-blah-blah-cakes that we all adore.

That said, Derrida is easier to parse than the official reasons:
"According to the new director of Transmediale Stephen Kovats and to the Guest Curator of the exhibition CONSPIRE... Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, the great cause for banning this project from the festival 4 days before its opening has to be find in "judicial and legislative reasons" (Kovats) and "personal - curatorial and ethical convictions" (Petrešin-Bachelez)"

- L.M. 1-31-2008 12:35 am

A pdf update of the transmediale kafuffle courtesy of Aleksandra Domanovic.
- L.M. 2-19-2008 5:55 am





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