The public programme of Crack Up – Crack Down explores the performative and discursive iterations of comedy and satire, historical and contemporary, regional and international. Many ascribe the recent upsurge in stand-up comedy to the increasing polarisation and political tensions across the globe. Originally an Anglo-American genre, stand-up is being challenged today on many fronts – as a platform for toxic masculinity, an extension of Eurocentrism – and the resulting indigenisation offers some of the more interesting examples of performance art today. Satire, comedy and humour will be explored in a series of talks as a forum for the limits of language, affect and criticism.
- Concert by Augustin Maurs
Friday, 7. 6., 19.00, Švicarija (Tivoli Park)
Being out of Tune – Favourite Songs of my Neighbours, Abusers and Despots, 2019
Also performing: Igor Feketija, Leon Firšt and Peter Firšt.
Augustin Maurs is a French musician who combines conceptual, performative and collaborative practices, often working beyond the strict field of music.
Being out of Tune is a parodic recital based on songs that have been used, abused and co-opted by ruling powers or performed by political leaders. Playing with the notions of consonance and dissonance, the piece deals with musical interconnections between popular, populist and totalitarian forces. The songs are understood as found objects, set in a cabaret show where the very act of singing has been problematised.
Blutrote Rosen (Germany, 1924)
Suliko (Georgia/Soviet Union)
Awaara Hoon (India, 1951)
Is That All There Is? (USA, 1969)
Mei Hua (Taiwan, 1976)
Meglio ‘na Canzone (Italy, 2009)
Blueberry Hill (Russia, 2010)
Toita Sei? (Zimbabwe, 2011)
Öňe, diňe öňe, jan Watanym Türkmenistan! (Turkmenistan, 2015)
Ikaw (The Philippines, 2017)
Brother Louie (North Korea, 2012)
- Stand-up comedy
Hosted by Anja Wutej
Friday, 7. 6., 20.00, Švicarija (Tivoli Park)
Dragoș Cristian (English)
Marina Orsag (Croatian)
Boštjan Gorenc aka Pižama (Slovene)
Boštjan Gorenc – Pižama is an Anglicist, translator, writer, stand-up comedian and rapper. He has translated children’s and fantasy literature and was included on the IBBY Honour List in 2012 for the translation of Good Omens (Gaiman, Pratchett). His show 50 odtenkov njive (50 Shades of the Field) has delighted audiences, as has his book sLOLvenski klasiki 1. He was already engaged in improvisation during his years of study, competed in the Impro League for several years, and has become a regular moderator of impro competitions. He performs with the Improleptika improvisational theatre group and is one of the most prominent representatives of stand-up comedy in Slovenia.
Dragoș Cristian is a Romanian stand-up comedian who started his comedy journey in Singapore and is currently based in Berlin. His sets shift the focus away from the familiar Anglo-American territories to address Eastern European and Asian cultural nuances.
Marina Orsag’s sets skewer queer identity, gender and other dinner-table talk typical for the Balkans.
Anja Wutej’s entry into stand-up comedy started as a more affordable alternative to therapy. She got addicted to it after studying with Caroline Clifford.
- Saturday breakfast
Saturday, 8. 6., 11.00, ZVKDS Gallery
Ajdin Bašić in conversation with Branko Đurić – Đuro and a presentation of Top lista nadrealista. - Symposium
Saturday, 8. 6., 16.00, Švicarija (Tivoli Park)
Vid Simoniti
Equality and Cynicism: Satire in Martin Krpan, Top lista nadrealista and Borat
Vid Simoniti is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, where he runs the MA in Art, Aesthetics and Cultural Institutions. His work focuses on contemporary aesthetics, especially on the question of how art can bring about social and political change. Satire is usually understood as attacking the hegemonic political order. Some satire, however, mocks everybody equally: the subordinates as well as the rulers. This may seem cynical and cruel, but is precisely the strategy certain satirists have used to show the real cost of political oppression.
Mohammad Salemy
Between Three Revolutions: Notes on the History of Iranian Political Satire (1900–1980) in the Age of Social Media
Mohammad Salemy is an independent Vancouver/Berlin-based artist, critic and curator. His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail and Brooklyn Rail, Ocula and Spike. Salemy is the organiser of The New Centre for Research & Practice. Through providing a brief history of political satire in Iran between the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the presentation focuses on new global satires in the form of short texts, tweets and memes. How do these formats resonate with this particular history, and what have these three revolutions, the first two in the context of politics in Iran, and the last one in the context of media technologies worldwide, learned, and what can they continue to learn from each other?
Arthur Fournier
No More Fuchs Left to Give
An ecological survey of online mercantile systems, including Walmart and Amazon, suggests that faint echoes of Walter Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, Honoré Daumier and John Heartfeld may yet be trapped within the amber of 20th century media, fragments of radicalisms past turned into novelty t-shirts and “framed wall art for your home or office” in the boundless hall of mirrors of digital capitalism’s virtual entrepôt.
Emily Apter
Micropolitics of the Meme
How are we to understand and implement the political vocabulary of a genre of communication native to the 21st century?
Emily Apter is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University and a Remarque-École Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor. Her books include, amongst other titles, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (2018), and Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013).
Metahaven
Sleep Walks The Street
The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, design, and installations, and is united conceptually by interests in poetry, storytelling, digital superstructures, and propaganda. The collective’s films – The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016) and Hometown (2018) are often presented in immersive installations and share an aesthetic logic with the collective’s design work in an attention to surface, texture and the intelligent simplification of complex logics and visual forms. They have published extensively, including, amongst other titles, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (Strelka, 2014) and Uncorporate Identity (Lars Müller, 2009).
Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) was a poet from St. Petersburg, Russia. Vvedensky’s work has been associated with several of the Russian avant-gardes, but his main contribution has been an intensely personal process of going beyond the epistemic coordinates of constitutive language. Much more than following the designation of “joke”, or even “absurdism”, Vvedensky’s poetry centres on not-knowing, and, according to the poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky, a “negative” and “apophatic” theology that is hinting at older (Orthodox) origins. Vvedensky made a living as a children’s poet whilst he was officially prohibited from writing serious literary works. Yet his poems for children carry the exact same tendencies, with one piece, “Lullaby”, focusing on a scene in which sleep itself walks the street. The question remaining is whether this scene’s protagonist was a dream, as much as whether the poem represented one.
- Opening of the exhibition: Alejandro Paz, The Garden of Epicurus
Sunday, 9 June, 11:00, Plečnik House
This year’s prize recipient exhibition presents Alejandro Paz, the recipient of the Grand Prize of the 32nd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. On this occasion, the Guatemalan artist and architect is entering into a dialogue with the philosophy of Epicurus and the private garden of Plečnik, where his performative intervention entitled The Garden of Epicurus has come alive. In 306 BC, Epicurus founded a school in Athens, called The Garden, because it was located in one of the city’s gardens. According to testimony, an inscription above the front door read, among other things, that pleasure was the greatest good therein. Epicurus taught that a happy life must be based on the achievement of pleasure, both sensual and intellectual, which can be achieved with balance and moderation. He believed that spiritual pleasures were more important than physical ones, even though he did not accept duality as the opposite of both dynamics, but evaluated them through an interplay of balance in which they complement each other. The Epicurean garden of learning was, contrary to traditional Greek morality, open to everyone (including women and slaves), and reflected the importance of community and friendship. Plečnik’s garden was also a space of coexistence and the search for pleasure of various people, who believed that the garden is a venue where nature creates a spontaneous balance between the physical and ethical.
Alejandro Paz chose Jože Plečnik’s house and garden for the realisation of the project in order to express his admiration for his architectural heritage and accentuate the importance that he attributes to nature in his own work. According to the artists, Plečnik becomes a silent protagonist in this project, creating an ideal venue of temporary coexistence with the help of his house, studio and garden. In the process of thinking about his engagement with Plečnik’s home, Paz let go of the idea of an architectural intervention and decided to go for a performative one, in which the orchestra plays without a conductor, while the musicians are scattered throughout the garden and house.
Visitors can acquaint themselves with Paz’s art through a selection of his earlier video works, in which the artist becomes a resigned commentator on the fate of certain individuals from Guatemala in the grip of corruption, crime, exhaustion and hopelessness.
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Slavs and Tatars, Gut of Gab (Ha’mann), 2018; resin, steel; 160×60×50 cm. Courtesy of the artists.
