DIVA Station
DIVA Station on Tour:
2nd Stop in New York
Presentation of archive, screening of video program and discussion
With curator Barbara Borčič, program advisor and head of video programs at SCCA-Ljubljana & New York based artist Emil Memon & video artist and film maker Pawel Wojtasik

Sunday, December 4, 7.30pm
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art
322 Union Ave, Brooklyn, New York

After a successful presentation on the West coast at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) DIVA Station archive is on the road again or more accurately in the air. This time heading towards the East coast to Brooklyn, the most populous of New York City's five boroughs. DIVA Station will be hosted by UnionDocs (UnDo) Center for Documentary Art based in Brooklyn. The event will include the presentation of DIVA Station – an archive of Slovene video art produced by SCCA-Ljubljana and a screening of curated program DIVA Station Presents No 3.

Emil Memon, New York based artist, and Pawel Wojtasik, video artist and film maker, will join the discussion.

Barbara Borčić, program advisor and head of video programs at SCCA-Ljubljana will present DIVA Station, the archive of video and media art in Slovenia, accompanied by DIVA at Škuc Gallery, a video essay by Nika Grabar presenting the topic of archiving as “the preservation of memory”.

More: www.uniondocs.org/event/2016-12-04-diva-station

DIVA STATION PRESENTS NO 3

Curator: Barbara Borčić
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana, 2016
Duration: 66 minutes
Premiere: LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los Angeles, November 16, 2016

The program consists of 17 video works and is divided into three sections.
 
From analogue to digital
Miha Vipotnik: Space 2, 1986, 1’53’’
Ana Čigon: One More Kick, 2009, 4’35’’
Sašo Sedlaček: Veliki izklop / The Big Switch Off, 2011, 1’48’’
Luka Dekleva: Singing Bridges, 2008, 4’14’’
Vesna Bukovec: Important News, 2003, 54’’
Nika Špan: How to Socialise the Blues?, 2007, 1’58’’

From memory to fiction
Marko A. Kovačič: Naprej v preteklost / Forth into the Past, 1995, 9’30’’
Valerie Wolf Gang: Distant Memory, 2014, 2’43’’
Miha Vipotnik: Path of Crazy Wisdom, 1993, 9'58''

From impression to digression
Emil Memon: Schizophrenia / Blue movie, 1983/95, 5’37’’
Nataša Prosenc Stearns: The Noise Factor, 2012, 3’15’’
Urška Djukić: Persistence 2, 2014, 1’22’’
Neven Korda: Jesensko tihožitje / An Autumnal Still Life, 2002, 4’05’’
Zvonka T Simčič: Broken h-h-h…egg, 2000, 1’
Ana Čigon: Finger in U.S., 2010, 2’15’’
Jasna Hribernik: Tense Present: Šum fotonov / Tense Present: Photon Noise, 2015, 1’18’’
Andrej Lupinc: V 8. minutah okoli sveta / In Eight Minutes Around the World, 1990-2000, 9’35’’

Intro text (pdf)

Program (pdf)

Cover image composed of: Ana Čigon: One More Kick, 2009, Miha Vipotnik: Path of Crazy Wisdom, 1993 and Nataša Prosenc Stearns: The Noise Factor, 2012.

DIVA Station is a compendium of projects that seek to explore, preserve and disseminate Slovenian video/new-media art. It is being developed since 2005 at SCCA-Ljubljana with documentation and archive as well as research and curated programs that are accessible on-line and are open for cooperation. Today DIVA Station includes archive and mediateque with over 1000 video works by local and international artists, documents of events and works from European media archives.
We constantly add newly acquired works to the archive and promote an overall understanding of artistic oeuvre and video/media practices by organising discussions, presentations and exhibitions.
More: DIVA on-line

Barbara Borčić
Art historian and media theorist, advisor at SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts and head of video programs and video archive DIVA Station.  She is active as a curator, lecturer and publicist. She has regularly lectured and published texts, e.g. Video Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 (Massachusetts: MIT Press 2003); What Television Can Be, And What Artists Can Use It For, Amuse Me (Ljubljana: Mestna galerija, 2013); The ŠKUC Gallery, Alternative Culture, and Neue Slowenische Kunst in the 1980s, NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst – The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija & Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015). She is the author of the book Celostna umetnina Laibach. Fragmentarni pogled [Gesamtkunst Laibach. Fragmentary View], (Ljubljana: Založba/*cf, 2013).

Emil Memon is a Conceptual Artist in a sense that he works with ideas as a building elements for his work and uses diverse appropriate mediums to properly materialize them. He works with Video and Video Installations, Music (as diverse as Noise electronica, Rock, Dance and POP),Digital New Media, Painting and Drawing,in Spirit of Social Sculpture with Art Curatorial, Hybrids between Art and Design, Art Criticism and currently he is working on a Film. His work can be confusing in this sense but it has through all of these different mediums a center in dealing with Act of Creativity and Art as a tool of Social consciousness and Criticism. The element of aesthetics is used as delivery tool.
Through years he showed extensively in NYC, Berlin, Miami, Bogota, Munich, Ljubljana, Washington DC, Zagreb, Belgrade, Duke University, LA, Ottawa, Manchester Community College CT, Museum School in Boston, Lugano, etc. In 1990 as a part of Art group ATW he participated in a show at PS.1 and in project INBETWEEN at 1994 Venice Biennale. His work is in few American based Art Collections , Slovenian Embassy in Washington DC, ICC (International Criminal Court) in Hague, NL. collection DIVA( Archive of Slovene Video and Digital Art),Ljubljana, Slovenia. Memon attended Graduate school/ Installation Art & Printmaking ALU, Academy of Fine Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, is a Fulbright Scholar and holds an MFA/ New Forms from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NYC.

Pawel Wojtasik creates poetic reflections on cultures and ecosystems in the form of short films and large-scale installations. His investigations into the overlooked corners of the environment have led him to pig farms, sewage treatment plants, wrecking yards and autopsy rooms. Wojtasik received an MFA from Yale University. From 1998 until 2000 he was a resident at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Buddhist monastery.
His work has been shown at festivals such as Berlinale, New York Film Festival, and Hong Kong International Film Festival where his film Pigswon the grand Prize in the short film category in 2011. Wojtasik was a featured filmmaker in the 2009 Flaherty Film Seminar. His installation work includes the immersive 360° Below Sea level, about post-Katrina New Orleans, exhibited at MASS MoCA and included in Prospect.2 Biennial; as well as Single Stream, shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The cinema version of Single Streamwas presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial and at Ann Arbor Film Festival.

UnionDocs (UnDo) is a Center for Documentary Art that generates and shares big ideas. They bring together a diverse community of experimental media-makers, dedicated journalists, critical thinkers, and local partners on a search for urgent expressions of the human experience, practical perspectives on the world today, and compelling visions for the future. The staff find powerful, thought-provoking works of non-fiction (film, video, sound, photography, oral history, printed word, and performance) and present over one hundred public events each year, attracting people from across and beyond New York City. Whether celebrating the discipline and artistry or sharing counterpoint and honest critique, audiences at our intimate UnDo Center are encouraged to join in open discussions with the director, creator, or producer of the work, who is always in the room.

Co-production: SCCA-Ljubljana / DIVA Station, UnionDocs (UnDo) Center for Documentary Art
Curator: Barbara Borčič
Video preparation: Neža Grum, Luka Polutnik, Toni Poljanec
Web support: Vesna Bukovec
Support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia

Thanks: Jenny Miller (assistant artistic director UnDo), Emil Memon (artist), Fritzie Brown (executive director CEC ArtsLink), Pawel Wojtasik (video artist and film maker), and artists

[Published: November 21, 2016]