In the past academic year, six individual seating units from mainly secondary materials were created as an initiative and joint project of postgraduate industrial design students of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. The product has been designed in a way to allow for sustained maintenance and replacement of worn-out parts. The corner affords students a place to withdraw to and study in a room allocated for proofreading and lectures. The units are movable and allow for any type of configuration for group or individual use. At mid-term exhibitions, the exterior walls serve as flexible exhibition areas for posters.

The project is the result of the efforts to use organic materials or materials of secondary origin.
 
Felt is the production residue of the company Filc d.o.o.
Textile waste (approx. 13 kg/unit) is used as wall soundproofing material and has been sourced by the Dravograd Organic Cooperative.
Cardboard tubes are scrap materials of the Lokatex company.
 
We would like to express our gratitude for their support to the following companies:
DS Smith d.o.o.
Donar d.o.o.
Fintex d.o.o.

Stories Blending Seamlessly
The title of journalist and translator Krečič Scholten's debut novel, Nikoli ni prepozno (It’s Never Too Late), already alludes to the fact that the short story collection was written at a mature age. They were not penned all at once, the first story was written almost a decade ago, then gradually the stories that had won awards at various competitions attained everything necessary to jointly compile a collection. The stories’ titles mainly refer to popular sayings and proverbs, thereby creating a tension between common language usage and the astonishing suspense triggered by a story's twist. Krečič Scholten is an omniscient narrator, she has infinite knowledge about the lives of her protagonists, and then goes on to scrutinize, with psychological plausibility, their psyche, their innermost fears and hopes. 

The writer portrays a wide range of characters, from people only just grappling with the world as one of life’s greatest mysteries, to those departing it more or less resignedly. She gives voice to different professions, education levels and genders. The world in Krečič Scholten's stories manifests itself as mysterious, replete with misunderstandings: a radio host, for example, catches a Pulitzer Prize winner's hand a few times during a studio interview, which she completely misinterprets; the host merely wants to silence the jangling of her bracelets. The author examines her subjects in detail – not just the radio culture she knows first-hand, inside and out –, and is able to identify with the various emotive worlds of her characters. Inner worlds tend to be quite complex sometimes, which of course allows for dizzying, but somehow logical twists; in these stories fantasy gives way to pragmatism and mundane reality that sometimes dumbfounds us, and other times burdens and bends us irreparably. In addition to a pervasive passion for storytelling, the stories reveal a highly articulate linguistic skill and a talent for proficiently depicting the human condition condensed into a few moments – and a few pages. 

Matej Bogataj 

Design student Pia Šilec presents a fashion collection created in the academic year 2020/21 within the framework of her undergraduate studies of fashion and textiles under Assoc. Prof. Matea Benedetti at the Faculty of Design.

With her collection, the designer seeks to demonstrate the organicity of nature. Her design concept rests on natural lines defined by the dividing shades of earthly colours. The collection is based on oversized tailoring inspired by men's clothing. The garments feature large-scale asymmetric organic lines that add an appealing, unique and feminine aspect to the collection.

Each model of the clothing line expresses the diversity and individuality of nature, the inspiration of an organic lifestyle that is gaining in importance and attracting more and more attention.

The designer succeeded in reconciling innovative tailoring, suitable materials and colours with the spirit of the time, thus exhibiting her own creativity and response to the emerging challenges of modern society.

The Designers Society of Slovenia is presenting innovative projects of young designers. Various young creators will be featured individually throughout the year.

Public guided tour of the Koža/Skin International Photography Exhibition will be conducted by curators Kristina Ferk and Nataša Ilec Kralj on Thursday, 3 March, and Thursday, 10 March, at 6 p.m. in CD's Foyer I. 

Skin – organ, boundary, shield, medium, metaphor. This permeable surface stands as a barrier to the “outer” world, an observable texture of our public persona, and at the same time a safeguard for our perceptual inner self that mediates and constructs our environment. Carved by the space and time, the skin is a (living) tissue, shaped by the chisel of time inscribing on it the contours of an individual's autobiography. It is carnal, intimate, personal, always aware. It belongs to the senses and at the same time it is alienated, libidinous, even uncanny – it belongs to us, others... everyone – but at the same time, to no one at all. Skin is a part of a wider social tissue, framed by the gaze of others, seemingly animated by its own spirit. It is a membrane of the world and every individual – it equally radiates and inscribes identity.

The exhibition Skin unveils different photographic practices, touching the topic of skin, be it gently or roughly, from its superficial mindfulness, its microscopic structures, to its social embodiment – in the economy of the gaze, it oscillates between the desired and demanded, exposing physicality, the relations between the real and the created, between immersion and deconstruction. As does photography.

Reflections of Dostoyevsky, an intrepid explorer of the darkest recesses of the human mind and one of the greatest influencers of all time, are found in a selection of Beletrina’s published authors through diary entries, memoires, and allusions.
The exhibition, featuring new original portraits by photographer Mankica Kranjec, an overview of the writer’s body of work and minute details that bring to light his intimate essence, is a digital and analogous showcase of featured authors that blends their reflections of Dostoyevsky into a complex whole, thereby also marking the 25th anniversary of the Publishing House Beletrina.

The interactive exhibition is accessible to everyone and aimed at visitors aged 13+.

Visitors are encouraged to post their comments and contributions on FB and IG.

The exhibition Widows and an Orphan that had filled the empty halls of Cankarjev Dom throughout the epidemic, resonates with the message that design is capable of solving myriad issues. When its authors got back to work after the cancelled opening event, each one of them in their line of work faced the various challenges, brought about by the new and pressing realities. The insights they have gained in the fields of culture, business and healthcare will be explored in a discussion, in which they will draw attention to the key notion of including designers in the working processes of various professions that can use their experience and advice to better prepare for the times ahead.

Today the real of photography is a field in which billions of photographs linger, lives, reproduces themselves, flickers with the frequency of the digital screen, ornaments themselves with likes, comments and remarks, and constantly battles for the fleeting attention – which seem so fleeting that it seems that fort his »new« photography one does not even need the »old« photographic attention – because it is being replaced by some other more profound, for some even ominous, attention of the eye of the apparatus of algorithms. Does it even matter nowadays how we as humans see and experience photographs? Is it the more pertinent question what does the Google see? Indeed, what do the “glasses” see? It seems as we would be looking through the transparent screen, as a “window to the world” (as was long the description of photography) whereas in fact we are looking at the screen – at the veil of transparency, shrouding the reality. If one would be able to go through the glasses – what kind of the world would one find there?

The Rabbit Hole projects simultaneously question the present-day reality and unveil the ways of its technological embeddedness while hinting on the possibilities of its future permutations.

The accompanying programme will be in Slovene with an exception of 27 February event which will be held in English and will be happening in M3 + M4 Conference Hall.

In cooperation with Membrana Institute and Fotografija magazine

Cankarjev dom exhibitions are open Monday through Saturday between 12.00 and 19.00. Sundays closed.

The CD Gallery and other exhibition areas can be accessed through the employee entrance from Prešernova Street (Council of Europe Park).

In compliance with the guidelines of the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) on the gradual re-opening of museums, galleries and other exhibition areas visitors are required to observe the following instructions>>


Artists: Ajda Bevc, Petra Bukovinski, Hana Jesih, Maša Majce Mesarič, Ajda Schmidt, Jan Virant
Curated by: Radovan Jenko

Held as part of the Slovenia 2050 Festival

Exhibition opening: 20 January 2020 at 20.00

Curators (Membrana): Jasna Jernejšek, Jan Babnik

Artists: Marion Balac (France), Jojakim Cortis & Adrian Sonderegger (Switzerland), Miha Godec & Valerie Wolf Gang (Slovenia), Simon Menner (Germany), Špela Škulj (Slovenia)

From the early belief in the power of photography to ‘steal souls’ to the present-day belief in its power to ‘steal data’, our understanding of the origin of the medium’s special power has changed and evolved – from being anchored in the perception of photography as a magical emanation of reality to currently stemming from its embeddedness in data systems (and its power of manipulation) within the omnipresent apparatus of social surveillance.

In practices as diverse as photojournalism and spiritualism, photography has been invested with the notion that it can reveal more than the human eye, piercing the reality and turning unseen into seen, absent into present, distant into close, transgressing both the limitations of human perception and physical limitations of space and time. That is builds illusory and fantastical landscapes, whilst dispelling illusory perceptions of the world. Photography has created a new – expressly photographic – dimension of seeing and has never ceased to excite our explorative spirit in probing into the unknown, invisible, incomprehensible, exaggerated, enchanted – i.e. the world of magic.

This special power of photography has persisted to this very day, with the difference that the onetime ‘analogue’ magic has been replaced by a new, much more elusive, uncontrollable and inscrutable magic of algorithmic equations, machine vision, virtual and enhanced realities – the magic of our dystopic future. Photography has never been denied its original mystical aspects – and thus continues to be one of the most magical modern-day technologies.