Structura Art Stays

Contemporary Art

07/08 – 09/18/2021, Slovenia

Art Stays announces the 2021 program
19th Festival of contemporary art, Art Stays – STRUCTURA
Opening weekend: Thursday 8 July – Sunday 11 July 2021
The exhibitions will be open until September 18, 2021
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ART STAYS, Ptuj Contemporary Arts Festival has for years been a consolidated European event that gives visibility to projects and works by emerging talents and established artists in the arts sector. Founded in 2003, it reached its 19th edition this year with the theme STRUCTURA.

If No more silence, it had been an unprecedented and adventurous journey into sound, word and silence starting from the reflection that we must urgently give voice to the fragility of our world to rethink the future; Structura notes today the desire to review things, starting from the depths, from the composition of the grammar that we assign and with which we read everything around us.

Like trees connected to the cycle of life, but actually suspended between reality and imagination, we have traveled through contradictory images, volumes, structures, forms capable of generating processes, dependent on the time of spatial growth and development. Structures that, looking at them closely, seem to emerge, get lost or acquire different identities as they are thrown into another space. A reversal of perspectives and vision, an imaginary journey through the metamorphosis of forms and definitions of structure.

Structura, directed by Jernej Forbici and Marika Vicari, was born from the intention of wanting to reflect not so much on the nature of the individual, but on the reciprocal behavior of various elements placed together, be they men or artistic operations, capable of experiencing the different conditions and metamorphosis of the world into forms of coexistence and transformations or, in the depths of dependence between things, men and our planet.

The main exhibition Structura 01, hosted in the halls of the City Gallery, represents the structure through an international and multidisciplinary dialogue between the monochrome works of Duša Je-sih and Julia Mangold. If the artists Herbert Hamak and Dušan Fišer investigate the behavior of elements, space and color in the forms and different structures, Matej Andraž Vogrinčič and Radenko Milan & Ro-man Uranjek instead reflect in a dichotomous way on uniqueness and multiplicity. While the Israeli artist Gal Weinstein challenges Israeli mythology, pulling the utopian structures of the last century out from under the carpet and the young artist Faig Ahmed tells the ancient Azerbaijani tradition in the texture broken by a colorful spatial form; Mohammad Al-Hemd transforms Western elements into a vision of local ideals and symbolic representations of Middle Eastern culture. The exhibition is curated in collaboration with Studio La Città di Verona, Riccardo Crespi from Milan, Mon-toro12 from Brussels, Galerija Fotografija from Ljubljana and Arte Laguna Prize from Venice.

The Dominican Monastery hosts a unique sculpture exhibition, Structure 02, where the works of the well-known Georgian artist Tamara Kvesitadze will be presented for the first time in Slovenia, alongside the new fascinating works by Sasha Frolova, Johannes Nielsen, Annalu, Tomaž Plavec and Milojka Drobne. Created in collaboration with the Kornfeld Gallery in Berlin and Punto sull’arte in Varese, the exhibition ensures a unique exceptional experience in the different construction and composition of the material.

The famous rooms of the historic Ptuj Castle will host a selection of small unpublished bronze works by the Japanese artist Kyoji Nagatani, and of medium and large latex format, by the Russian artist Sasha Frolova, reinforcing the intent of Art Stays to determine and reflect between structures and paths, the relationship between ancient art and contemporary art.

Structure 04, Sincron Gallery Reloaded, is a unique international programmatic path, made up of works of art, writings, words, faces, settings and different atmospheres. For the first time in the historic Miheličeva Gallery in Ptuj, the Italian curator Afra Canali opens an exhibition dedicated to the beginnings of Italian constructivism and cine-visualism in the American, European and Asian spheres as well as the importance of archives.

The Public Library of the city of Ptuj will host an interesting exhibition dedicated to the structures, experiments and media of young international art, which will feature young artists from three very different backgrounds: graduates from ALUO in Ljubljana, Singapore Art College LASALLE and Shenkar – Ramat Gan’s Israeli multidisciplinary art school. Among the invited artists Tomo Sta-nič, Rok Horvat, Adi Brown, Einav Zeichner, Lilach Yaron, Neta Chavy, Nitsan Zimra, Noa Berant, Ron Yosef, Roni Binder, Tair Uria, Valeria Modalvski, Teo Annjee, Nur Fazera Binte Makrof, Ed-mund Kerk, Wee Xuan, Bevelyn, Tasfia Hasin Nawar, Danial Shafiq Bin Mohd Fauzi …

If organic forms, readable on multiple structural, emotional or physical levels, are instead the subjects of the latest unpublished works, which the Austrian artist Ina Loitzl will present at the Galerija Magistrat; geometric abstractions, concepts of space, perspectives and construction, are instead the fields of action and representation where the Slovenian artists Suzana Brborović, Ana Skobe, Doroteja Dolinšek, Janja Kosi, Katja Pal, Maruša Meglič will meet in the exhibition that this year Doroteja Kotnik curates and dedicates to the FO.VI Gallery in Kidričevo.

The extraordinary Baroque performance by Sasha Frolova, conferences, workshops, a new project by Movimento, Creative Label of videomapping will set the streets and historic buildings on fire, site specific installations in the city center created by the ART STAYS team, concerts and musical experiments, require the articulated program of the 19th Art Stays Festival, which involves all the main public and private, historical, artistic, cultural, political and social institutions of the ancient city of Ptuj, offering structures, different paths of a unique dialogue in articulated perspectives and metamorphosis.

STRUCTURA, 19th ART STAYS FESTIVAL, 2021
Directors and curators: Jernej Forbici and Marika Vicari
Opening weekend: July 8-11, 2021
Dates: July 8 – September 11 2021
http://nomoresilence.si