VN20

Construct, fabrication, fake

With VN20, Via Negativa performs a gesture of reinscribing memory in its own record of the past. The artists who have co-created the past of the VN platform install and archive themselves anew each month in MSUM – the space of institutionalised memory.

VN20 confronts two strategies of memory. The first is the memory of the creators of the past – a subjective projection of the past that manipulates its own memory through strategies of repetition, recreation, reenactment, reflection, transcription, inscription, rewriting, forgetting, compiling, distancing, ironising, mythicising, or demystifying all that has been and all that has not been.

The second is the memory of archival documents – petrified traces of what once was alive, fragments of what the camera has or has not seen, what the photographer has or has not captured, what the critic has or has not written. The archive as a catalogue of the imprints of an event or an era is an arbitrary formalisation of the past that completely misses the point of what VN really is: a live performance gesture.

We, the makers of that past, claim today and in advance, still in sound mind and despite our broken bodies, that this has nothing to do with what really happened and what we really did. VN20 is not the truth, it is a construct, it is a montage, it is a fabrication, it is a photoshop, it is a fake.

The time frame of the VN20 cycle is formed by Gregor Zorc’s story of the first performance of the Seven Deadly Sins cycle (Starting Point Anger, 2002), which he concludes in the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova with the last performance of All That You Came For (2009) and his performance in the last project of the Irresolvable cycle (Physis, 2021), which takes place at +MSUM all year round as the video installation Physis Cinema.

Curator
Bojan Jablanovec

Conceived and performed by
Gregor Zorc • Anita Wach • Marko Mandić • Kristina Aleksova • Barbara Kukovec • Nataša Živković • Katarina Stegnar • Špela Trošt • Loup Abramovici • Tomaž Grom • Olja Grubić

Tomb VN20
Matej Stupica (space and installation design)
Stella Ivšek (Physis Cinema video mapping and synchronisation)
Eduardo Raon (Physis Cinema sound design)

Photo and video documentation
Marcandrea Bragalini • Dejan Habicht • Vid Hajnšek • Vid Uršič

Producer VN
Špela Trošt

Producer MG+MSUM
Tomaž Kučer

Coordinator MG+MSUM
Adela Železnik

Production
MG+MSUM, Ljubljana • TAM-TAM, Ljubljana • Via Negativa

Venues
+MSUM Ljubljana • TAM-TAM plakatna galerija Figovec, Ljubljana