31 July – 4 August 2019

NOVO MESTO, SLOVENIA

ARTISTS AND CURATORS
Deja Bečaj (SI), The Cool Couple (Niccolò Benetton & Simone Santilli, IT), Container Doxa (SI, HR, CN), Luka Cvetković (RS), Mark Farid (UK), Đejmi Hadrović (SI), Rok Hudobivnik (SI), Michael Kelly (UK), Peter Kolárčik (SK), Thomas Kuijpers (NL), Luca Marcelli (IT), Milica Mijajlović (RS), Danilo Milovanović (SI/BA), Mila Panić (BA/DE), Natalija Paunić (RS), Tamara Spalajković (RS), Samra Šabanović (BA/FI), Saša Tatić (BA/DE), Rafal Zajko (PL/UK).

MUSIC PROGRAMME
Balans, Kukla, Kalu & The Gradient, Container Doxa, Gabi, Loutseau, Some1else.
Visuals: BEAM TEAM

Since its reconceptualization in 2014, Fotopub Festival strives to recognize the qualities of emerging artists and create a space for independent research, experimentation and unconventional curatorial gestures. Fotopub has since become an established international platform that promotes, stimulates and develops the freshest artistic activity across contemporary arts and cultures.

In its sixth edition, Fotopub continues to extend artistic, curatorial and geographical dialogues. Once again, the festival is set to bring together international artists and curators, whose practice is located in the gaps and overlaps of contemporary visual arts, new media, and technology. This year, Fotopub will present a series of projects that critically disturb and question how meaning is constructed through socio-political rituals and shaped by various power structures. The exhibitions directly address how the divergence between fiction and reality becomes a tool of manipulation for the construction of collective and individual identities through visual and popular cultures and information technologies, all conditioned by extreme capitalism.

From 31 July to 4 August 2019, Fotopub will organise a series of formal and informal events, including 6 exhibitions, 3 projects, a curated music programme and the Fotopub Portfolio Review, which will bring well-known and respected artists, curators, gallerists, publishers and journalists from the international art world to Novo Mesto. This year, the work of 27 artists and curators from 10 countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, The Netherlands and The United Kingdom) will be showcased exclusively in unconventional and/or abandoned spaces around the city centre, with site specific installations and performances taking place on the streets of Novo Mesto.

PROGRAMME

The festival will open with 1999 – The Oracle Told Me I’d Fall in Love with the One, an exhibition curated by Natalija Paunić and featuring Milica Mijajlović, Rafal Zajko, Tamara Spalajković and Luka Cvetković. The exhibition takes a look at two seemingly unrelated events that took place in 1999 – the global premiere of The Matrix and the NATO bombing of Belgrade, Serbia. The site-specific installation questions the popular notions of good and bad, and the ambivalent construction of reality, which is compromised by geopolitical interests, fear and personal safety. This year, Fotopub is adding a special series of exhibitions, Fotopub Repete,to its festival programme and inviting back four artists who had exhibited in its last five editions. During the festival, The Cool Couple will participate with their performance, Karma Fails; a fake meditation studio called Meditation Is Visualization; and a participatory sculpture, Turborage, an installation of soft cement pillars that the public will be free to vent on with a baseball bat. Mark Farid will return to Fotopub with his project Poisonous Antidote, a live news feed of artists’ real-time digital footprints. Thomas Kuijpers will round up the Fotopub Repete series with When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, a project that questions the power of the images we are exposed to and the psychological impact of how traumatic and violent events are represented in the media. Each festival day, Mila Panić, Đejmi Hadrović and Saša Tatić will execute Rocking Chairs, a participatory performance during which the three artists’ performative act will create a space for the public discussion of pressing social, political and economic issues. The winner of the 2018 Fotopub Portfolio Prize, Danilo Milovanović, will showcase several of his recent artworks researching the relationship between the various phenomena that can be observed in the public space, and their exhibiting potential. A trans-disciplinary music group, Container Doxa, will be in residence during the festival; through a participatory performance, they will explore how language, sound and visual codes are correlated. Finally, the programme will close with the third iteration of the Fotocubs Mentorship Programme, a group exhibition conceived and produced by last year’s Fotopub Volunteers under the mentorship of the Fotopub Team.