Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent contemporary art curator and writer based in Paris. Between 2010 and 2012, she was co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris. She is chief editor of the Manifesta Journal since 2011. At the moment she is busy organizing “U3 – The Triennial of contemporary art in Slovenia” which will take place from June 13th, 2013, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. The Triennial started in 1994 and it is an overview of the artistic production happening in Slovenia. Local and international curators are always alternating. Peter Weibel was the first international curator, in 1997. As Petrešin-Bachelez explains: “I was born in Slovenia but I am now based in Paris, and I was very moved by this invitation, as I am half an outsider and half an insider in the region where I grew up. For the upcoming triennial I will try to present as much as possible the youngest production, the younger generation of artists, performers, choreographers, visual artists. In Slovenia there is an immense vague of demonstrations at this very moment, everybody is on the street. The story of Slovenia being a very successful former communist country and it has been the first country of that area to enter the European Union, is really over, it all resulted to be only a dream. The citizens are no longer standing still in front of the information that there is a lot of corruption in the state and they are experiencing it quite vividly.” “When I am meeting the young artists I face a very dark vision and this is something I would like to bring forward in this Triennial.” Then she mentions a book written by New York based artist and activist Gregory Sholette. The book is titled “Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture” and it was published in 2010 by Paperback. Petrešin-Bachelez says that in this book the author “talks about the 1 percent and the 99 percent, the 1 percent being the highly visible ones, or something that we can relate to as contemporary art, while the 99 per cent are the creative people that have diplomas and masters in fine arts but never find their way to sustain their practice in any way. The Dark Matter refers to something that is invisible but very very present.” “I think that these conditions are almost everywhere we look today: the Global North has the super developed art system. Whereas in the global south there has always been the issue of the relationship with the society and the highly engaged artistic practice.” “In the Western World there is still this prevailing idea that there can be an history of art written from the site of the object, an object that we can observe autonomously from the how and where it was produced. Also, if you talk about the object, how can you dissolve the subject, the subjectivity? All this canonical history of art has really to be rewritten. The artists should be actively involved into another way of writing the history of art.”
Interview by Tiziana Casapietra