Paper short abstract:

The Slovene artist Tadej Pogačar uses manipulation of the (in)visibility as a operative strategy in his art work, which is related to museums and the wider social sphere. Manipulating the (in)visible in the realm of museum narration of history or in the seemingly homogenous social tissue is the core of Pogačar’s focus: the means of deconstructing any notions of “neutrality” and “naturalness” (of mechanisms of knowing and social systems).

Paper long abstract:

The Slovene artist Tadej Pogačar (born 1960) uses manipulation of the (in)visibility as a operative strategy in his art work, which is related to museums and the wider social sphere. Pogačar defines his artistic strategy as the "new parasitism", which is based upon the complex approach towards the notion of a museum. The presentation of museum artefacts explicitly concerns the past but implicitly also the current mechanisms of the production of knowledge. It is precisely these narrative mechanisms, which often prove to be sophisticated systems of exclusion and ideological disciplining of society (European "orientalism", unauthorized histories, post-colonial production of The Other…) that Pogačar transgressively exposes into visibility/knowing through "parasitic" interventions into existing museum collections. Pogačar's work in the wider social sphere (projects "Kings of the street", CODE:RED, "Parallel economies") concerns the topic of social (in)visibility: erasure of certain marginalized social actors from the field of vision is a symptom of the predominant distribution of power in macro-social structures. Their entry into (social) visibility - through the use of art strategies, advertisement, theatre -subverts the invisible into visible and thus reveals the existence of a parallel social reality, which is oppressed due to its incompatibility with the predominant social regime. Manipulating the (in)visible in the realm of museum narration of history or in the seemingly homogenous social tissue is the core of Pogačar's focus: the means of deconstructing any notions of "neutrality" and "naturalness" (of mechanisms of knowing and mechanisms of social systems).