Maja Bojanić
Laboratory Undone: The Secret Mechanisms and Backstories of The Institute for Mould Preservation
04/09 — 05/10/2024
At the end of her residency at Enter Here, visual artist Maja Bojanić will present three past projects that reveal the invisible mechanisms and backgrounds of the fictional laboratory of The Institute for Mould Preservation. This imaginary institute investigates, monitors, and studies the spread of mould species within cultural institutions such as museums, galleries, libraries, archives, and their storage spaces. In her practice, the artist speculatively places the fictional laboratory in different formats and contexts, using performative storytelling to confront the viewer with ambiguous situations that constantly walk the fine line between truth and fiction. The works in the exhibition thus represent different chapters of an ongoing project that brings to the fore questions of working conditions in the cultural sector, the future role of cultural institutions, academia, and science, as well as our conception of art and our relationship to heritage.
In the basement, the visitor encounters the first phase of the project: the documentation of the event marking the first public unveiling of the long-lost mould colony, titled The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Volume Two (2022). It was revealed that the DobraVaga Gallery’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List was not due to Jože Plečnik’s architecture, but rather to this long-lost family of moulds that covered almost the entire ceiling. In keeping with its landmark status, an audio museum guide was installed on site to guide visitors through the ceiling installation. This unveiling also marks the beginning of the Institute, whose mission is to study and conserve the newly discovered mould species.
The following chapters of the project deal with the deliberate or accidental leakage of information, as the pipes in gallery spaces, can become devices for picking up rumours and secret information. For example, close to the small pipes in the basement, the viewer hears a faint whisper and quickly realizes that it is a distant conversation between two scientists discussing a new discovery of mould outside the DobraVaga gallery. Titled Managing a Mould Invasion: Guidelines for Disaster Response (2023), the work thus questions the veracity of rumours but also represents a phase of the project in which the institute begins to introduce eavesdropping through pipes as a new methodology that will allow them to map Alternaria in the spaces of other cultural institutions.
In the most recent work, A Fungus Among Us (2024), exhibited in the upper space, we can eavesdrop on an introductory course in “post-restoration,” a notion taught within the university program of Advanced Post-Conservation Studies. The year is 2224, and in the territory formerly known as Ljubljana, the ideas of preservation and care have undergone deep-rooted alteration. Museums have been recognised as Departments of Gathering Decay, while the concept of art has faded into oblivion. The course is designed to uphold the legacy of the Institute for Mould Preservation, but one day, the lecture accidentally resonates beyond the confines of the classroom, exposing a carefully concealed institutional error within the future academia.
Maja Bojanić (1997) graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2020. She continues her postgraduate studies at the Department of Transdisciplinary Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her artistic practice explores the relationship between remembering and forgetting within the context of dominant historical narratives, which she questions through the use of fiction. She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, including DobraVaga, 7:069, Škuc Gallery, P74 and Kamera (Ljubljana), the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Celje), the Museum of Fine Arts (Osijek), and the project spaces aqb (Budapest), OK Transit, VBKÖ (Vienna), Pogon (Zagreb) and DiHAN (Groningen). In 2023 and 2024, she was nominated for the OHO Group Award, the central national award for young visual artists.
CURATOR: Lara Mejač
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