The work of Berlin-based artist Andreas Mühler-Pohle revolves around the ontological and representational questions of photography, its essence and social meaning. His work explores the limits of both photography and reality, but above all his work is characterized by the oscillation between, as he points out in his article "Photographic Dimensions", the aesthetic, political and technological aspects of photography. Andreas never simply positions himself on one of these aspects – he devotes himself to research or rather to focusing on the subject of representation. In his work the categorical choice between high and low culture, between political engagement or aesthetic conservatism, between digital deconstruction or analogue reproduction – turns out to be wrong – one might say even insincere. For him, it is precisely the technological-aesthetic-political construction of the subject of representation that is at the forefront, which calls for diverse visual approaches. His oeuvre ranges from works dedicated to ontological questions of photography, through research works on the meaning of everyday images, political aspects of the visual, through complex photograms and videos addressing the ecological issues of recycling photographs, to projects combining photography, video and sound to deconstruct the environment. 

The exhibition Environmental Imprints presents selected works from Andreas's broader body of work Studies on Water and features photographs from the Danube and Hong Kong projects, video of Hong Kong's Shing Mun River, and sound of the waters of Hong Kong and the Danube. The selection of photographs and videos echoes the artist's exploratory approach and his ‘unalignment’ between the aesthetic, political and technological aspects of the visual. In the exhibited works the human environment is established through the in-between space of air and water – with its vague contours, compositional fractures and partial structures, the land in these works is a mere afterimage, a figment of playful imagination between the natural elements of water and air, crystallised almost at random – as a kind of aesthetic excess of their relationship. As if the land in the images of bridges, quays, ships, city skylines and dams – the land in the image of man, that is – is merely an excess product of the breaking of the waves and the current of the river – the flow of nature, which, in the exhibition, is complemented by its unconscious – the sound of water's depths.
 

Jan Babnik

Danube River Project, 2005  

The Danube is the most European of all rivers and the only one that crosses the continent from west to east. I became interested in a portrait of this river in 2004, after having dealt extensively with the subject of water a few years earlier. In Berlin, on the Spree River, I made my first tests with the split technique popular with divers, in which the camera looks half below and half above the surface of the water, thus combining two levels of landscape in one image. After months of further research, I made four trips between July and November 2005, first through Germany, Austria, and Slovakia, then to Hungary, then to Croatia and Serbia, and finally to Bulgaria and Romania. I took water samples at the shooting locations and inserted their chemical values into the pictures as a “blood count” of the river, so to speak. My way from the source in the Black Forest to the mouth in the Black Sea, 2800 kilometers long, was that of a traveler who only visited each place once and took the respective weather and light conditions as they came. Thus, the Danube River Project is ultimately a personal river log – a poetic-documentary interpretation that would certainly look very different today.
 

Hongkong Waters, 2009–2010

Hong Kong was my second home for many years and – until its seizure by the Chinese regime – a place of immense fascination. A hyper-vertical architecture rises from a tangle of picturesque water landscapes that present themselves in hundreds of islands with endless coasts and ports, canals and waterfalls. My long-cherished plan to have a city portrait follow the Danube project should not be realized anywhere else: Hong Kong, a city of water that has been exposed to a continuously rising sea level for decades and in which the element of water means life and threat at the same time. I began underwater tests on Hong Kong Island and Cheung Chau in the summer of 2008, and between January 2009 and December 2010 made seven trips, most of them lasting several weeks, during which I made not only the photographs but also numerous video and sound recordings that became part of the Hong Kong Waters project. In contrast to my river project with its consecutive course, the water landscapes of Hong Kong lay at my feet anew every day, and I like the idea of having followed a circular eastern mode after the linear western one.
 

Andreas Müller-Pohle, 2021

Visual artist Tilyen Mucik has devoted her photographic practice to botany and alternative photographic techniques. Her work involves observing, inquiring into, and recording nature. The world of plants has always been an object of interest to the artist, and a photographic herbarium gradually replaced the one compiled in childhood. Under the title Floriography, the exhibition integrates several art series created since 2018 with a view to summarizing the artist's love of flora and the diverse manifestations and contexts of plant life.

The Terra Ignota multi-sensory video installation addresses the sensorial experience of biodiversity loss. It consists of a video projection and showcases that take inspiration from the natural-history museum dioramas. The project ambitiously aims to reduce cognitive human bias towards the future, which prevents us from making better personal and collective decisions for a more sustainable tomorrow. 

P l a t e au r e s i d u e is an imaginary identity of the award-winning duo Aljaž Celarec (BA in geography, Faculty of Arts University of Ljubljana, and MA in photography, AKV St. Joost, the Netherlands) and Eva Pavlič Seifert (BA in art history, Faculty of Arts University of Ljubljana, and MA in visual culture, Aalto University, Finland). Their projects are dedicated to landscape ecology and new media, on a quest for new ways of raising public awareness. Their artistic output is grounded in video installation, artworks that give voice to project contributors and collaborators, natural forms such as rocks, air, organisms and other substance clusters, which are reorganized into unusual new forms and new media systems. The couple are based in Novi Kot, in the hinterland forests of Mount Gotenica and Snežnik plateau.

What does a couple of visual artists do when their child is born? They individually and jointly explore and document the baby’s arrival and growth. Each of them uses their singular visual language to develop their own parallel reality. Through metaphors, Tereza Kozinc depicts conception, pregnancy, childbirth and the experience of early motherhood. For the first time in his life, Klavdij Sluban lived without travel for a year and a half. This immobile journey is the greatest experience of all since he put down roots in the homeland of his ancestors. His second child was born. The exhibition, which stands out from conventional examples of family photographs, is an ode to light and new birth.

How to draw a story in a single picture – and without words? 

Without words, but in a thematic tension with the title. In a thematic tension that is not merely a metaphorical comment or interpretation or counterpoint to the predictable horizon of expectations, but a high-voltage physical surge – before the brain realizes what the eyes are looking at, the body knows: it is seeing the invisible (its own). It is seeing the forbidden (its own). It’s looking at the rebellion, the freedom, the game. It’s looking at a story where the boundaries of the possible are extending. It is seeing a wild thought that is thought without words – in the image.  


Accompanying text: Barbara Korun

Photographs are “foot-notes”; they are a gaze at music or, better yet, a gaze inside music. It is a work-in-progress, a research “by images” into those aspects of music that the audiences usually do not see. Notes are a “presence/absence”, they are in the margin yet deeply present; music is present in the breaks during rehearsals, it is in the stage floorboards where an exhausted musician has stretched out, it is in the kiss of two young lovers on a beach to the rhythms of a double bass breaking into the waves. Throughout its wanderings in Italy and abroad, from a festival to a recording studio, from a beach to a club, the gaze tries to go beyond the stage, beyond the instrument, beyond the outward appearance usually granted by the musicians. There is a continuous attempt at investigating the human soul while trying to avoid stereotypes, clichés, the already seen. Therefore the images that involve musicians, the audiences, those who are just passing through and those involved much against their will; all of that artistic universe that revolves around music, that experiences the musical instant of improvisation and then fades away.

Luciano Rossetti
 

CV 
Luciano Rossetti has pursued a career in photography since the late 1970s.
He collaborates with magazines specialized in theatre and music for whom he has made dozens of covers.
In 2004, with other photographers, he co-founded the Phocus Agency, which specializes in performance photography. He was among the founding members of the Association of Italian Jazz Photographers AFIJ (2019), where he serves as secretary and board member. Involved in numerous projects for prominent recording labels, as well as many assignments as official photographer for jazz and theatre festivals.
Since the mid-1990s he has held solo and collective exhibitions both in Italy and abroad,
including the Triennale and Palazzo Reale in Milan, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia, Villa Celimontana in Rome, Gallery of the Marktgemeinde in St. Johann in Tirol, the Orensanz Foundation, Jazz Record Center and Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Centre in New York.
His photography has recently earned international acclaim for its excellence. In 2021, he received the "Best Photo of the Year Award”, as well as a nomination for Career Excellence in Photography from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA), the American Jazz Journalists and Critics Association.

www.lucianorossetti.it
 

After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ljubljana became part of the new state of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During the short-lived kingdom, Ljubljana enjoyed one of its most important and prolific architectural peaks. With his numerous interventions, architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) transformed the city into a symbolic national capital. Plečnik rejected modernist approaches and rebuild the city following his own vision. 

In the process of Ljubljana’s overhaul, Plečnik contextualized the existing space, taking into account the different levels of the city, its natural, architectural, historical and immaterial qualities, and streamlined it into a series of public spaces (squares, parks, streets, promenades, bridges) and buildings (library, churches, markets, funeral home complex). 

Thus emerged Plečnik's Ljubljana, a phenomenon of twentieth-century urban landscape inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In response to the new architectural trends, Ljubljana’s modernist architecture took shape concurrently. 

It was designed by Plečnik's contemporaries, most notably Josip Costaperaria and Vladimir Šubic, as well as Plečnik’s students (France Tomažič, Edvard Ravnikar and others). In the year that marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Jože Plečnik, the photography exhibition seeks to thematize the metamorphoses of the city.
 

The exhibition presents a series of Peter Uhan's portrayals of family life, portraits that are anything but typical. Offering glimpses into an amusing and comic, occasionally chaotic and exhausting yet altogether beautiful life of a family of four and half, the photographs feature a colourful array of stories, memories and experiences.

Peter Uhan (1977) pursues a career in professional photography, primarily theatre and portrait, as well as occasionally commercial and architectural photography. He regularly works for the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana and the Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica, and occasionally for other theatres and independent theatre companies. He has documented over 350 performances. In 2012–19 Peter Uhan collaborated with the German visual artist Ulay on performance art. Recipient of several Slovenian and international awards and distinctions, he rarely holds exhibitions of his work.

FEATURED ARTISTS: Jošt Dolinšek, Andrej Lamut, Tilyen Mucik, Sara Rman, Blaž Rojs, Anja Seničar

Curator: Hana Čeferin

Photography, perhaps more so than any other field of art, has been defined by a commitment to experimentation from its very beginning. The first successfully stabilised photographic images were created as a sequence of physics and chemistry experiments, and the patenting of the first daguerreotype in 1839 was followed in quick succession by new techniques – the calotype, the heliotype and the ambrotype, and later camera-less processes, most notably the photogram, the chemigram and the luminogram. The definition of photography has been expanding even further in contemporary art – from digital intervention to works created using artificial intelligence, unusual chemical compounds and countless emulsion combinations, integrating living organisms and unexpected mediums –, there are infinite ways of interpreting the photographic within the context of art. While photography is still often perceived as merely an image that is captured on a light-sensitive surface by means of a photographic camera, this definition may have been inappropriate since the very beginning of the medium. 

Bearing this experimentation in mind, the Beyond the Lens exhibition turns to younger Slovenian photographers who combine different mediums, re-examining materials and form, and exploring the potential of the medium of photography beyond the use of a camera. Developments in Slovenian contemporary photography over the recent years have been truly exciting. Younger artists adopt highly idiosyncratic approaches to photography, fully aware of the principles of the medium, unburdened by photographic “purism”, combining styles, materials, tools and image carriers. They organise themselves into groups, studios and collectives, apply to international platforms, exhibition projects and publications, and independently integrate themselves with the art world. Slovenia’s vibrant and varied young photography scene undeniably reveals new spins on the medium that brim with freshness and individuality. 

Within the context of these developments, the aim of this exhibition is to present the production that has evolved through the younger generation’s attitude towards traditional approaches to the medium. The exhibition does not aim to present the young artists’ latest or most contemporary works, but seeks to shed light on the specific understanding of the medium that started to develop in our cultural space. The exhibited works, most of which have already featured in solo shows, are here presented collectively as a reflection on the possibilities of the medium itself, the photographic orientations of the younger generation, and the viewpoints on photography embraced by today’s young artists in producing it beyond the lens. 

In their showcased projects, Andrej Lamut and Tilyen Mucik address photography through the thematic field of botany. In methodically observing invasive plant species in his immediate surroundings, and presenting them as extra-terrestrial invaders, Lamut’s Invasive Alien Species series deals with the topic of the environmental crisis and its consequences, both hidden and in plain sight. With her Flora Femina series, Mucik literally introduced botany into her works by incorporating plant dyes into images and using green-plant leaves in place of paper. Sara Rman and Anja Seničar understand photography on a formal level, whereby the photographic paper subjected to specific treatment can already constitute a bearer of meaning. By burning, crumpling, and destroying, experimenting with emulsion and exposure, they process the photographic paper until it takes on unexpected shapes and assumes the form of a standalone object. Blaž Rojs and Jošt Dolinšek combine various mediums – Rojs adds acrylic paints, plexiglass, textiles and other elements to Polaroids, his primary medium, composing multilayered objects, and Dolinšek introduces several entry points of gaze by way of frame-inserted mirrors, at the same time strengthening their ambient role through sonic accompaniment and exploring the intimate experience that opens up in observing the images.

The featured artists take different perspectives on photography and interpret it in their own, wholly distinct way. However, the common denominator in all these styles may be their exploring the ever-new potentials of the medium and challenging its boundaries, while concurrently searching for ways to merge meaning and form. They approach the medium from an expressly technical angle, through reflection on materiality, while taking a strong interest in the experience of the viewer and all the possible interpretations of their works. Through the formally and contextually varied works of the six featured artists, we enter the field of contemporary photographic output that takes form outside the box and beyond the lens.

As the year 2021 is coming to a close, the Small Gallery hosts an exhibition of photographic works by Igor Škafar. The Ulica exhibition comprises a large number of portraits, mostly featuring young people. The artist has been creating these portraits continuously, with unwavering dedication and in search of the new and fresh, for the past twenty years. 

The exhibited works include both older photographs taken on film and more recent, digital photographs. In a unique way, the exhibition will also lend a small insight into the artist’s creative process.

Igor Škafar was born in Ljubljana in 1975. He has pursued a career in photography since 1997, when he took up the position of assistant at the Manjana photographic studio. Two years later he started contributing photographs to the Mladina weekly. He now works for various media and agencies, and regularly publishes his work in Mladina. Ichisan – DJ (and photographer) Igor Škafar’s stage name – started out on his musical career as a guitarist with various bands, and later devoted himself to electronic music, a genre to which he is especially partial.