Slovenian Pavilion Opened at Venice Biennial

Venice, 10 June

The "A+A" gallery, which will be Slovenia's national pavilion during the 51st Venice Biennial, opened on Friday evening, anticipating the Sunday grand opening of the biennial. Slovenia is represented by Vadim Fiskin's installation "Another Speedy Day".

"Another Speedy Day" is a room with a window. It enables the viewer to experience the whole day in a few minutes by shifting the lighting from light to darkness to subdue the viewer to psychological effects of the sensation of time relativity.
The project is thus an artist's homage to Albert Einstein and the 100th anniversary of the Theory of Relativity, as it deals with time and space travelling, said the co-curator of the pavilion Igor Zabel.
Fiskin, born in 1965 in Russia, has been present on the Slovenian art scene for a decade. His career reaches back to the 1980s, when he was a member of the art group "The World Champions" and is believed to be one of the main representatives of Moscow art in the 1990s.
His art unites the themes of utopia, cosmogony and aeronautics, personal poetics, and a self-critical attitude to his artistic practice and its social context. The works of this magnificent artist are always on the border between fiction and reality, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art wrote on its web site.
A Ljubljana-based Slovenian citizen, Fiskin said in a recent interview with the weekly Mladina that he owns four passports: in addition to a Slovenian and a Russian one, he also has a symbolic diplomatic passport of the Neue Slowenische Kunst art group, and a passport of a Finnish artist.
Therefore, he is less concerned with his place of birth than with the question which country offered him the best working conditions, Fiskin commented on how he slowly switched his base from Moscow to Ljubljana, when he started cooperating with Slovenian retro avant-garde artist Dragan Zivadinov over ten years ago.
"A+A", the Slovenian gallery in Venice which promotes Slovenian contemporary art, will host an exhibition of four young Slovenian artists. Simon Bolcic, Rebeka Redek, Matej Suligoj and Blaz Vehovar will present the results of their exploration of painting and photography at the Venezia Academy of Fine Arts.
This will be only the first in a series of similar exhibitions the gallery intends to put on this year to enable students from the Venice Academy the opportunity to set up their first exhibition.
The "A+A" gallery is a non-profit exhibition space, a centre for the promotion of contemporary Slovenian and international art, financed by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, the gallery says on its website.
It first opened ten years ago in Madrid, inside a space restored by the internationally acclaimed architect Boris Podrecca. After five years, the gallery moved to Venice where, in addition to hosting temporary exhibitions, it is also the site of the Slovenian pavilion for each Biennale.

Slovenian Pavilion Opened at Venice Biennial

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