THE BIG SLEEP
POLE-POSITION
November 27, 2010 – December 21, 2010
Galerija Gregor Podnar/DUM Artists’s Association is pleased to announce The Big Sleep, a solo exhibition by Nika Špan, which will be presented at the Galerija Gregor Podnar Project Space Ljubljana.
Nika Špan, who lives and works in Düsseldorf, examines the existing conditions of exhibiting and production that relate directly to her own principles of thought and everyday experiences. In her work, she often plays the theme of how an artwork comes to be, or rather, the impossibility of its total mediation.
The Ljubljana installation of The Big Sleep, pole-position consists of two spatially separate segments. Both parts of the exhibition space are lined with strips of white paper. In the first area, which is brightly lit, the paper strips run from the wall to the windows; on the opposite side, in the second, darkened area, the paper strips stretch from the windows over to the opposite wall. In the first exhibition area there is a bench; in the second, a low chair with a high back, which in one position is intended for thinking and in the other for dreaming.
The exhibition is connected with Špan’s first exhibition at the Galerija Gregor Podnar, in 2005, when the gallery was still in Kranj. That show, which was also called The Big Sleep and composed of two sections, featured, on the one hand, a number of paintings with red dots and, on the other, slide projections showing the artist asleep. The paintings, as objects of value, entered into dialogue with the slide projections. The selection of slides showed a person (the artist) in a detached state who without her knowledge was being photographed in her sleep. Similarly, in The Big Sleep, pole-position, Špan very clearly presents physical and mental spaces that cannot be completely divided. By thematizing the exhibition space itself, the Ljubljana project brings out even more certain underlying principles of exhibition practices within contemporary art, that is, it exists in a kind of pole-position.
The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.