Slovenia became an independent country in 1991 which established itself as a subject in the international community through new associations and integrations.
The main objective of the Interior-correspondences photographic project is to point out the ambivalent relationship between internal imaginary space of the individual and public physical architectural space of four institutions: The Parliament of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana, The Parliament of the European Union in Strassbourg, UN General Assembly hall in Geneva and NATO Conference Centre in Brussels. All these spaces are explicit carriers of social structures and meanings which embody the symbolic and respectively the real power while manifesting the coming apart or uniting of the civilizational cultural-political history. Freedom, fraternity and equality in the grip of the democracy discourse? As modern bourgeois society we have been asking ourselves these questions since the times of Enlightenment and French Revolution. But perhaps these concepts are historically outlived categories, archaic monuments which are succumbed by the daily inflation of their use, never reached ideals, present only in the spectacular range of the media space? Can we today still understand evolution, progress, and revolution as excursions into the field beyond the established and verified order which is reluctant to change, a travel beyond everyday social reality and dispersed subjectivity of the individual?
Therefore the appeal of a great statesman from the 1960's: "Don't ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," is very much alive today, and so is the cry of wide masses a few years later: "Let's be realistic, demand the impossible!"
Author of the exhibition
Bojan Salaj
Coordinator
Lidija Tavčar
Exhibition and graphic design
Bojan Salaj
The project was supported by
National Gallery of Slovenia
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
Photonic Moments / EMOP 2014
28 May–3 September 2014
National Gallery of Slovenia
Prešernova 24
1000 Ljubljana