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A name always bears a symbolic mandate. As soon as false pretenders appear, questions arise as to the symbolic mandate’s power, its validity and justification. Names refer to genealogies, yet thereby always involve a certain distribution of power. To arrogate a name is to arrogate power. There is a claim to power in every name, in assuming the social role that goes with it, in transmitting symbolic legacy, in social impact, in genealogical inscription. The story of false pretenders entails the moment of bemusement – one’s feeling that, really, one is always a false pretender, as there’s no way one could inhabit a name legitimately, naturally, feeling fully justified bearing the name one bears. No sufficient grounds can ever substantiate it; no name is ever covered by the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason. The feeling of being an impostor, false pretender to a name, isn’t personal sentiment or idiosyncrasy; it’s a structural feeling accompanying names – their shadow and effect.

EN | 10.8 x 17.5 cm | 64 pp | b/w | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN 978-1-291-98060-8

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Eternal September. The Rise of Amateur Culture is a group exhibition that explores the relationship between professional art making and the rising of amateur cultural movements through the web, an historical event that is triggering a big and fascinating shift in every field of culture, especially visual culture. This catalogue features a curatorial text by Valentina Tanni, together with an interview with artist Matthias Fritsch, the man beyond the Technoviking meme, an essay by artist group Smetnjak on practicing critical theory in the form of internet memes, and visual documentation of Tanni’s ongoing curatorial project The Great Wall of Memes. Featured artists: Mauro Ceolin, Paolo Cirio, Electroboutique, Paul Destieu, Matthias Fritsch, Colin Guillemet, David Horvitz, Maskull Lasserre, Aled Lewis, Dennis Logan (Spatula007), Valeria Mancinelli and Roberto Fassone, Mark McEvoy, Casey Pugh, Steve Roggenbuck, Helmut Smits, Paweł Sysiak & Tymek Borowski, TheGamePro, Phil Thompson, Wendy Vainity.

EN | 15.2 x 22.9 cm | 82 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN 978-1-291-98060-8

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What is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? What has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what can explain the limited presence of this artistic practice – which appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organisation of the world we live in – in critical debates?
Beyond New Media Art is, on the one hand, an attempt to analyse the current positioning of the so-called New Media Art within the broader field of contemporary arts and to investigate the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and limited visibility in contemporary art history. On the other hand, the book is also an attempt to introduce new critical and curatorial strategies, which would render this marginalisation a thing of the past, and to elucidate the topicality of art that deals with media and the issues of the information age.

The original entitled was published by Link Editions, Brescia, in 2013.

SI | 14.8 x 21 cm | 206 pp | b/w | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN 987-1-312-09435-2

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In the summer 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. This life event introduced a break into their artistic practice, which evolved into one of the most radical explorations of life in the age of biopolitics. Featuring a text by Domenico Quaranta, this book documents and discusses their recent work, a a continuum that is sometimes produced by companies and institutions as a reaction to their life, sometimes by isolating and documenting specific moments in their life. ID cards, passports and bank cards become the means of a research that undermines the very concepts of “art” and “artwork”, and that challenges both the economic and legal systems in their attempt to regulate our existence in the world, and the art system in its attempt to determine and protect the value of an art piece, while actively seeking for the complicity of both in order to exist.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 80 pp | b/w | paperback cover | 2013
ISBN 978-1-291-66546-8

The catalogue of Sašo Sedlaček’s solo exhibition Supertrash hosted by the Art Gallery Slovenj Gradec in 2012 includes essays by Luka Omladič and Petja Grafenauer.
Waste is the key topic of the Slovenian artist oeuvre. Waste is the pure truth of production, which cannot be brushed aside; waste is the proletariat in the world of objects. This is why art that dares to reflect upon this issue simply must be activist and subversive, says Omladič.
Sedlaček deals with the rejected from our society in many ways: from the local overproduction of printed propaganda to the global circulation of waste, from the neglected beggars in our cities to the 38 million space wrecks circling the earth in fixed orbits. The interest of Sedlaček’s art lies in recycling, (re)use of the rejected, the improvement of the world and a warning to Western people. As Grafenauer points out, he tackles this matter with witty, creative and, above all, useful ideas.

ISBN 978-961-92192-2-5

Behind a name there is always a biography, the story of a life. But what if more than one person shares the same name? Which biography will be associated with that name?
Biografija, the Biography of Janez Janša by Marcel Štefančič Jr., originally promoted on the birthday of the former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, is not about his life, but about the life of the three artists who chose to bear his name.
As Janez Janša is a trinitarian name, the biography is also “one in three”: in the beautiful photographic book the early lives of the artists are told. Growing up in three different places and in three different countries, but in the same decades, the Seventies and the Eighties, they went through the red armies, the fall of communism, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the disintegration and subsequent reestablishment of ideologies.
Anecdotes from the lives of the three artists and the social picture of those years foretell the topics that they would later examine in their work.

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The catalogue of the exhibition Signature held in 2010 includes essays by art curator and writer Petja Grafenauer and theorist Miško Šuvaković. The project consists of twenty-seven paintings and nine triptychs, which were commissioned by the Janšas and painted by the artist Viktor Bernik. As part of the broader Janez Janša project, Signature raises many deep questions about authorship and individual identity, about the status of a work of art and the art market. The paintings of Signature are in fact signed by artists who did not paint them, and they display a tension between the “signature-images” and the proper signatures, which are socially agreed signs.
More widely, naming and designation are the angles from which Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša explore in their projects the conditio humana, the human condition, Šuvaković states.

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting sets out to offer some answers, albeit not exhaustive or definitive, to these questions linked to the artistic practice of re-enactment and its possible redefinition. Through the texts of critics, theorists and artists such as Jennifer Allen, Antonio Caronia, Rod Dickinson, Domenico Quaranta and Jan Verwoert, and through works by Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, IOCOSE, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG) and SilentCell Network, the book seeks to explore the relationship between the historical, social and linguistic aspects of re-enactment, and the meaning of this practice, against the background of the history of performance and the increasing mediation of life.

ISBN 9788890330865

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Does the name of the artist say more about society or about the individual? And what kind of knowledge does the name of the artist carry?
The book includes nine essays, one interview and documentation about the Janez Janša project, which took place in the summer of 2007, when three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša,” the name of the right-wing Prime Minister at that time. Starting from the question whether it is actually an art project or rather a private gesture, as the three artists had claimed, each author explores one of the implications of this “re-naming action” and the questions it raises in different fields – from the legal aspects in a comparative study, to the media impact.
Re-naming brings to light the importance of the name as a vehicle of individuality, of property and marketability – themes that are particularly relevant in the Western art system.

This textual and pictorial reader is a follow-up of Davide Grassi’s DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora, an anti-entertainment interactive movie that develops according to the audience members’ vote.
Inspired in part by the “pianisti” scandal in the Italian Parliament when a number of senators voted in place of their absent colleagues, DemoKino is a virtual parliament, that through topical film parables, provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of the modern politics: the questions of life – abortion, cloning, therapeutic cloning, water privatization, copyleft, euthanasia, genetically modified organisms, same sex marriage.
“When the issue of life enters the political arena and modern politics becomes biopolitics the democratic decision reaches an impasse: in the political arena laws are being debated on issues that can actually tolerate no decisions and any kind of majority rule is problematic in itself, any political reguation a publicy legitimated act of violence.” (Bojana Kunst)
DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora is an art book combining Dejan Dragosavac Ruta’s redesign of the visual and textual material of the original DemoKino project with texts from Antonio Caronia, Marina Gržinić, Leonardo Kovačević, Bojana Kunst, Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat and Aldo Milohnić providing a theoretical, artistic and social context.

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Originally published in the catalogue of the group exhibition Eternal September – The rise of amateur culture, this essay by the Slovenian art collective Smetnjak is an excursus about Internet memes, especially about the kind known as the image macro. The image macro – a picture combined with superimposed texts in order to produce a humorous effect – represents one of the most popular means of expression on the Internet for years.
The assemblage of an image and a caption seems to respond to the call Walter Benjamin made in his book about Charles Baudelaire The Writer of Modern Life, a call for a new form of literacy more native to the image-saturated society of spectacle.
Smetnjak have responded to this call by trying to practice critical theory within the pop form of meme, often focusing on the Slovenian cultural celebrity Slavoj Žižek. Here they explain why and how.

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Historians divide geological eras into different “ages”, and we can say that ours is the Plastic Age. This human-generated organic material is now part of the natural world, as the Great Pacific Plastic Patch shows. For Daniela Silvestrin, a cultural manager and curator specialized in bioart, this is where the artistic speculation of artist Pinar Yolas starts.
What if life started today in these plastic wreck-filled oceans? What kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?
Yoldas’ Ecosystem of Excess is the answer to these questions. She makes us face the issue of climate change, imagining the post-human world we are increasingly building with the overwhelming amount of waste we produce.
We have developed a “throw-away mentality” that has transformed us into a geological force. We need to redefine our way of thinking about nature, and that’s what Yoldas does, projecting us into a future without us yet created by us.

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In the summer of 2007, three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. They have claimed that it was not for artistic purposes but was an intimate, personal decision. Art curator and critic Domenico Quaranta takes them seriously, quoting Boris Groys: in today’s biopolitical age, life can be an art form. The three Janšas have gone beyond this, as they have canceled the border between art and life. Making life and art coincide has many consequences, for example in the Troika exhibition, by presenting their original and valid ID cards, passports and bank cards as artworks, they undermine the very concepts of “art” and “artwork”. These documents are ambiguous artifacts that challenge both economic and legal systems in their attempts to regulate our existence in the world, and the art system in its attempt to determine and protect the value of an art piece, while, in order to exist, they actively seek the complicity of both.

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Bojana Kunst, philosopher, dramaturg and contemporary art theorist, writes about “the theatre by other means” performed by BADco., on occasion of their Responsibility for Things Seen spatial intervention and video installation in the Aksioma art gallery.
BADco. is a Zagreb-based performance collective formed in 2000 by four choreographers and dancers, two dramaturgs and one philosopher. Their performances – which have been presented throughout Europe and the U.S. – do not follow a linear dramaturgical structure, but create the theatre event as a complex synchronization of actions, shifts, speeches and movements, focusing on a concrete political interest.
The choreographies, images, spaces and atmospheres of their performances are related to the ways in which we, the viewers, are present in the theatre. The performances invite the audience to speculate, to watch wilfully at the edge of the visible – it is precisely this peculiarity that actually renders BADco’s theatre political.

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Régine Debatty, Belgian curator, critic and blogger, writes about the art of Evan Roth, focusing on his TSA Communication project.
Evan Roth is a graffiti artist, a hacker and an open source coder. He believes in the free circulation of anything that is digital. His works with F.A.T. lab steer attention onto the fantastic five – Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – and related issues with humor and a mix of digital and analogic practices.
In TSA Communication, he has taken his artistic creativity inside one of the most controlled and liberty-killing places in our contemporary world: airports and airplanes. He has managed to alter the airport security experience, inviting the government to learn more about passengers rather than just inspecting the contents of their carry-on bags.
His works prove that hacker culture is democratic and that it should exist outside computers in order to question infrastructures and to go beyond rigid regulations.

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The journalist and dramaturg Andreja Kopač and the media art critic Ida Hiršenfelder here discuss the unique aesthetics and discursive strategies in the work of Neven Korda. In his career that spans three decades, Neven Korda has created a range of specific performative practices that emerge at the intersection of the textual, the visual and the musical. With his projects, Korda has been emphasising the importance of theatre both in its nature of communal space as well as in the appropriation of the performative that it allows. Every instalment or performance unravels and deepens his intentions, namely searching for the beautiful, exploring the effects of technical means on the perception of space and time, political agitation, and analysis of social dynamics.
The authors analyze Korda’s recent works, especially Consolidations (2013), investigating his usage of low resolution visual and vocal effects, the relation between the spoken and the visual, his choreographies.

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Domenico Quaranta, art curator and critic, writes about the 2004 project Evidence Locker by Jill Magid, now part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of New York. Jill Magid is a visual artist who has focused her work since the beginning (the end of the 90s) on surveillance infrastructures and the relationship between observers and the observed. In Evidence Locker, she has built an epistolary romantic relationship with the City Watch System of Liverpool – the largest video surveillance system in all of Britain – bringing into being a story in which love and seduction become tools for knowing.
The project is not only about power, control and privacy issues, but is also an investigation on the connection between humans and impersonal systems. As Quaranta explains: “In the age of smartphones and mediated communications, remote surveillance is now a component of most relationships. All lovers are potential Observers.”ž

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From the first human artistic expression in cave paintings until now, black has been constantly reinvented by art. Like other 20th-century artists (Rothko, Malevic, Klein) before him have done, Belgian Frederik De Wilde explores the nature of colors and produces monochromatic works, but focusing on black in a radical and scientific manner.
In Hostage, as art historian Elise Aspord explains, he has created a material made up of a vertical alignment of nanotubes of carbon that can absorb almost all rays of light, thus giving a new universal reference for black.
This work is the result of a close collaboration between scientists and an artist. It adheres to an aesthetic of the void and raises a paradox, making the darkness visible. Frederik De Wilde and his mysterious nanoblack invite the spectator to feel the “black shock” that is experienced when watching the unknown and the invisible.

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To media art curator and critic Ida Hiršenfelder, Antoine Schmitt’s art and his project Time Slip ask us: nowadays, who can divide the virtual from the real?
Time Slip is a LED news ticker operating in real time: a computer software transcribes official online news released by news agencies, changing the past tense to the future tense. In doing this, it constructs an ambiguous relation between the present, the past and the potential. Time Slip is about the relation between cause, effect, randomness and free will: reading news about facts that have already happened disallows the audience’s ability to be active about them; whereas, oppositely, reading news about the future raises anxiety and shows how the mass media proceed to produce submissive citizens, as opposed to informing them.
Antoine Schmitt, a French installation and digital artist, is first of all an engineer and a programmer who began his career in IT during the 80s.

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Vuk Ćosić, the Serbian pioneer of net.art, monologues with Franco and Eva Mattes, the famous Italian pair of art pranksters, also known as 0100101110101101.org. He leaves blanks to be filled by them in another moment, creating an asynchronous text performance.
They build a dissertation about their recent works – like Freedom, No Fun and Plan C – as Eva and Franco Mattes add comments and further explanations to Ćosic’s observations and hints.
The readers will find out that the three artists had met in Slovenia way back in 1998, when they were all the same person, Luther Blissett. Touchingly, Eva and Franco give thanks to Vuk for having made them discover net.art, and thereby their artistic (and life) vocation.
The text has been left exactly as it was written by the three interlocutors, typos included. In the end, they even make an appointment, mixing private and public coherently with many of their artistic projects.