13 Nov 2020

3 + 3 = 6 at SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts

3 + 3 = 6
Three women artists, three art practices, six decades

Artists: Ana Nuša Dragan, Zemira Alajbegović, Ema Kugler 

Curated by: Barbara Borčić, Peter Cerovšek
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana 2020


Part One: The City Hall Glass Atrium (moving images), Mestni trg 1, Ljubljana NOVEMBER – DECEMBER 2020

Part Two: Project Room SCCA (objects, photographs, documents and archival material), Metelkova 6, Ljubljana → THE DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED


The exhibition in the City Hall Glass Atrium has already been installed and is on view during lock down daily from 8am to 8pm. After the re-opening of galleries, it will be prolonged for another few weeks.

The exhibition presents video works, films, documents and objects by three women artists: Ana Nuša Dragan, Zemira Alajbegović and Ema Kugler who were/are active in the field of action/performance, film and video art in Slovenia. The beginnings of their activities date back to different periods of the 20th century: the 1960s (Dragan), the 1980s (Alajbegović) and the 1990s (Kugler). They have always worked in collaboration with numerous artists and in tune with the challenges of time, either in frame of socialist system or the one of liberal capitalism. The specific conditions of production have thus largely defined their artistic practices, ranging from Conceptual and Alternative to Post-Modern Art. Film / video was the central means of expression for them, and the basis for it was often live action, either happening and event or performance. Their characteristic narration oscillates from documentary to performative and poetics.


Ana Nuša Dragan (1943 – 2011) graduated from the Sociology and Psychology departments of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She specialised in television and video media at the British Film Institute in London in 1972, and received a scholarship from the French government in Paris in 1984. Between 1967 and 1988, she worked in short film and video art together with Srečo Dragan. Since 1988, she had been creating in the domain of video art and TV documentaries on her own. She worked as the Head of the Media Education at the Educational Technology Department in the National Education Institute.

Zemira Alajbegović (1958) graduated from Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. From 1982 to 1988, she was a member of the FV (112/15), multimedia and theatre group and of FV Disco club that worked on the Ljubljana subculture scene and this was where and when she also started to work in video. In the 1980s, she co-founded the video production FV Video and FV Label, the first independent music and video publishing house in Yugoslavia. From 1983 to 1989, she was a member of the Borghesia group (multi-media performances, video clips). In collaboration with Neven Korda, she was the author of numerous video films, music videos and dance videos. In recent years, she has directed documentaries and TV shows on art and culture. Since 2011, she has been working as a journalist and editor in the cultural sector of Radio Television Slovenia.

Ema Kugler (1955) graduated at the Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana. In 1980s, she worked at alternative Radio Student in Ljubljana and collaborated in numerous multimedia projects and alternative fashion shows. Her field of interest covers different media: performance, installation, film, video, and theatre costume design. She works as a freelance director, screenwriter, scenographer, costume designer, editor, and a multidisciplinary artist with unique artistic expression. She is the author of five feature films, numerous video and short films, performances, and art installations.

SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts is a non-profit production, research and educational organization that establishes an interdisciplinary support system for contemporary artistic practices. The main programs are the archive of video and new media art DIVA Station and the School of Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing World of Art.


Researching artistic oeuvres, their presentation and archiving is one of SCCA key program directions, and 3 + 3 = 6 exhibition matches well with its exhibition program of video and multimedia art made since 2005: What is to be done with AV archives (Kapelica Gallery, 2005), DIVA at Škuc Gallery (2009), Archiving multimedia art. Three case studies (Project Room SCCA, 2010), Dalibor Martinis: Data Recovery 1974–2009 (Vžigalica Gallery, 2010), Dan Oki, The Last Super8 mm Film (Kapelica Gallery, 2011), Video Turn (Vžigalica Gallery, 2012), Darko Fritz: Artistic self-archiving and archiving of artistic networks (Project Room SCCA, 2014), Race with Time. Performance in a Rear-view Mirror (Slovenian Theatre Institute, 2014), Proximity Effect (Vžigalica Gallery, 2016), Jasna Hribernik: (Post) production & Nataša Prosenc Stearns: Night Spring, Wishing Well (Vžigalica Gallery, 2016), e.city -Ljubljana / Projected Visions. From art in the urban context to fiction and dystopia (Apollonia, échanges artistiques européens, Strasbourg, 2018), Cheers to Women! 25 Years of Film and Video (Alkatraz Gallery, 2019), Transgression? (Kino Šiška, 2020), Miha Vipotnik: Faces of Analogue / Quantization of Red, (Slovenian Cinematheque, 2020).

------------------------------------------

The exhibition is a part of Not Yet Written Stories – Women Artists' Archives Online, an international research project funded by Creative Europe, in which SCCA collaborates with the Arton Foundation in Warsaw (leader of the project) and the partners: LCCA – Latvian Center for Contemporary Art in Riga and Office for Photography in Croatia. The aim of the project is to include the works of  women artists into public discourse about visual arts in order to avert their further discrimination and mostly elimination from the European history of art.

www.forgottenheritage.eu