with Živa Božičnik Rebec, Uroš Prah, Miha Šajina, Mia Ventin, Jakob Jurkošek, and works from the collection of Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova by Tibor Hajas.
Surface//Resistance was an exhibition event that intervened in the space of castle Cmurek. The castle, first mentioned in 1145, has over the course of the past century served many purposes: after a centuries-long ownership by the Stubenbergs, short management of the Mali family and the Nazi use between the Second World War, it became a home for elderly people and in 1956 a division of the Institute for the Mentally and Neurologicaly Ill Hrastovec. The division was operative until 2004, when the castle was abandoned in the first and so far only case of psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the country. Ten years later, a local cross-border initiative is striving to establish the Museum of Madness.
These diverse and irreconcilable historical contexts (and regimes of power) left a strong mark on the castle’s architecture. The rooms are packed with historical moments without a clear chronology, which establishes a time of the surface, a time of unusual co-existence without before and after, but rather below and above. It seems that the castle has ended its history, that it has become a heterogeneous monolith which resists every intervention. Its resistance is a resistance of an eclectic whole, in which every new intervention is threatened to be exposed as an unacceptable foreign body.
The event took this risk, and with the artworks of Tibor Hajas, Živa Božičnik Rebec, literary reading by Uroš Prah, music program by Miha Šajina, and accompanying video projection by Mia Ventin and Jakob Jurkošek contended with the ‘negativity’ of the surface. It magnified the resistance of the space, this evasive barrier that persistently rejects the context of its entry by itself being a form of resistance, a corporeal one – the inverted body of the absent bodies past and the anticipation of ‘foreign bodies’ to come.
emaograjensek 