23 December 2020
Maribor

Together with architect and artist Luka Murovec, we are preparing the exhibition “Pohorski Biseri” (“Pohorje Pearls”). The exhibition—conceived as a spatial installation—was developed during the artist’s month-long stay in our premises on Pohorje, during which he researched old Pohorje customs, superstitions, and mythologies that are now almost entirely forgotten. Due to the epidemiological situation, the opening of the exhibition will take place online. We invite you to join us, as this will also be the final exhibition at Gallery Epeka, which is closing after seven years of producing outstanding cultural events, due to a change in the Municipality of Maribor’s strategy regarding the role of cultural institutions in the city centre.

The project “Pohorski Biseri,” which Luka Murovec will develop at Gallery Epeka, builds on the artist’s previous experience in creating ambient installations that serve as a point of departure for reflecting on what constitutes shared and what constitutes private space, and how—within the existing socio-political order—we might reconcile individual and collectivist aspirations and find a zone between them that enables both individual freedom and the careful, sustainable “use” of natural and spatial resources that are, in both legal and ethical terms, shared. For the planned project, Murovec spent a month living in our premises on Pohorje and took as his starting point the relationship between the urban and the natural—one that, in the specific context of Maribor, is clearly reflected in the attitudes and often the emotions of residents toward the city’s most prominent hill, Pohorje. In urban policies, as well as in individual perceptions and the strategies of several economic sectors, it represents an intersection of a wide spectrum of interests, ranging from economic exploitation and de facto privatization to an almost intimate coexistence with nature in the immediate vicinity of the city and related conservative initiatives. Murovec’s perception of Pohorje and other less degraded locations near Maribor is further shaped by the fact that he has lived in Berlin for the past ten years, which has made Pohorje a neuralgic point of nostalgia and homesickness, and at the same time a starting point for a spatial installation that addresses themes common to all cities caught between developing new sources of income and preserving the characteristics that make a vital contribution to residents’ quality of life.

The exhibition is conceived as a spatial installation that will create a space within a space at Gallery Epeka, using architecture, light, sound, and scent to open questions about the relationship between the natural and the urban, and about the tension that forms in the space between these two poles. Murovec explores in-between spaces—places of transit, passage, and change. In their indeterminacy, they can reveal experiences of all kinds and allow opposites to meet, if only illusorily. They can be a profound hinge in the relationship between city life and nature. Sometimes these are functional spaces and, as such, places of unusual emptiness—of persistence, of duration. They speak of something else, of what seems clear and unambiguous, yet they raise questions, obscure, and conceal.

The artistic perspectives within the exhibition open up interpretations of in-betweenness while simultaneously calling its opposite into question: cities, which are presumed to be concrete. In this way, it is revealed that unambiguity is arbitrarily produced through coexistence—in politics, culture, and society—stemming from the power of consensus, from the agreement of many. Yet at the same time it always creates its counterposition: grey zones of indeterminate in-betweenness.

The exhibition will present the spatial and cultural link between the Pohorje mountain range and the city of Maribor. Through the spectrum of in-betweenness within this long-standing relationship, the exhibition will attempt to establish a concrete public space for rest and contemplation. The installation—envisioned as a lyrical work amid the urban bustle of the renovated Koroška cesta—will focus on the in-between space of nature and the city, the creation of an engaging spatial experience, and the opening of a non-sacral space of contemporary sacredness through a combination of technology, interior design, architecture, light, sound, and scent, thereby becoming a holistic artwork that draws the viewer in and addresses them directly.

More about the project and digital materials.

The project was created with the support of the Municipality of Maribor.