The exhibition Situation Dogville is one the ‘stages’ in a multiannual project that seeks to establish a model of long-term cooperation with young artists. The project, running between 2014 and 2017 under the auspices of the DUM Association of Artists, seeks to highlight that young artists need full support in order to realize their ideas, support that exceeds ‘ad hoc’ student exhibition projects, providing professional assistance, good production conditions and creating dialogue on the art work or context. The young artists who have been invited to participate will attempt to present their work several times, locally and internationally, in collaboration with the curator, DUM and the project partners. The main goals of the project are to ensure the production and distribution of, and reflection on, art works, whereby we particularly wish to highlight the lack of institutional support for younger artists and forge active relationships between institutions and artists (both public institutes and NGOs), and Slovenian and international art professionals, which will help artists to acquire experience of working in the contemporary art business.

Rather than on a concept or a topic, the exhibition consistently focuses on the presentation of ‘individual poetics’ and the artists’ ‘formal examinations’ in the last year. As the title hints, the exhibition does not engage in a curatorial discourse, as it is intended to focus on the art work as an individual unit, to liberate it from any of the ‘ideological’ drives of contemporary art and to present the work to the public through dialogue. The Playing Dogville exhibition will also be accompanied by a closed event, individual meetings of the artists with domestic and foreign experts working in different areas who will offer their observations on the new works and general artistic practice to the artists. The artists will meet the following experts: Noah Charney, Luigi Fassi, Andreja Hribernik, Róna Kopeczky, Roman Uranjek, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko and Vanja Žanko.

This is the second joint local presentation for the artists (the first was within the This Is Not a Love Song project in Miklova hiša in Ribnica), as we would like to establish continuity in the local presentations, while we are also intensively discussing cooperation with partnership organizations abroad, to promote the artists internationally. Both the multi-annual project and Playing Dogville exhibition seek to recognize the needs of the art world in Slovenia, with a focus on the needs of the younger generation, which, if achieved, would enable methods of working with emerging artists to develop more systematically and rapidly.