FESTIVAL ART STAYS
6th of July till 17th of September
Art Stays is one of the most important contemporary art festivals in Slovenia and the wider region, which became a reference event for many international galleries, museums, foundations and artists.
A variety of thematic strands will explore travel as part of artistic expression. They will not only examine travel as an inspiration for the creation of an artwork, but also the journey/path/movement as a work of art.
The festival will open on 7 July 2023 at 7:00 PM at the Ptuj Dominican Monastery, from where we will embark on a number of exhibition openings, talks with artists, concerts, performances, film screenings and other events. Do not miss the opening of the festival’s main exhibition Voyage at the Ptuj Town Gallery on Friday 7 June at 7:30 PM.
Opening Weekend 6 – 9 JUL 2023
Exhibitions 9 JUL – 10 SEP 2023
THURSDAY I 06 JUL 2023
18.00
OPENING of the 21st Art Stays Festival
> VOYAGE D’HIVER I Robert Cahen, 1993
Recognized as one of France’s foremost video artists. In Cahen’s uniquely nuanced world, fiction and document alike are presented as metaphoric voyages of the imaginary, exquisite reveries that describe passages of time, place, memory and perception. The Antarctic is the subject of this visually powerful journey into the unfamiliar.
∆ Dominican Monastery Hall
19.00
Exhibition Opening
Traslochi Heimat S.r.l. / Wherever You Protect I Zazzaro Otto
Heimat is a German word for belonging to a place or, better still, feeling at home, which leads back to the family dimension. Heimat is also the name of a relocation company, more specifically a s.r.l., which in this way introduces the concept of relocation as opposed to the home aspect that the German word implies. Thus, a conflicting aspect arises between what should be stable and what is instead in motion.
∆ Dominican Monastery
20.00
Photo Exhibition Opening
NA ROBU / ON THE EDGE I Ciril Jazbec, Matjaž Krivic
In collaboration with: Galerija Fotografija, Ljubljana
Matjaž Krivic and Ciril Jazbec both received the prestigious World Press Photo award for their work – Krivic in 2016 for his series Digging the Future, Jazbec in 2021 for his project One Way to Fight Climate Change: Make Your Own Glaciers.
∆ Ptuj Library
21.00
Opening of public installation SAILs and opening concert
JURE PUKL “Broken Circle” Trio
Saxophonist Jure Pukl is considered one of the most important creators of Slovenian jazz music. The recipient of the Prešeren Fund Prize (2015), he studied in Vienna, The Hague, Berklee College of Music (with masters such as Joe Lovano and George Garzone) and completed his master’s studies at the Graz Academy of Music. During his career he has played with stars such as Dave Liebman, Branford Marsalis, Esperanza Spalding, George Lewis, Maceo Parker, Vijay Iyer, Jeff Tain Watts and many others.
∆ Art Stays stage, Slovenski trg
FRIDAY I 07 JUL 2023
07.00 – 17.00
Summer Academy
ART STAYS
∆ Dominican Monastery
10.00
Exhibition Opening
MALA POLETNA AKADEMIJA / SMALL SUMMER ACADEMY
∆ Magistrat Gallery
18.00
Exhibition Opening
POTOVANJE Z… / TRAVELING WITH…
Beti Bricelj, Tina Dobrajc, Dušan Fišer, Mito Gegič, Aleksij Kobal, Miha Štrukelj, Uroš Potočnik and Jurij Zadnikar with Jernej Forbici & Marika Vicari
∆ Luna Gallery
19.00
Main Exhibition Opening
VOYAGE (Potovanje) I Nika Autor, Gabriele Basilico, Maxime Berthou & Mark Požlep, Vincenzo Castella, DK, Jošt Franko, Luigi Ghirri, Armin Linke, Robert Smithson/Nancy Holt, Bill Viola
The main exhibition of this year’s edition of the festival invites you on a journey in the company of outstanding artists. An exhibition to take your time, to indulge yourself in the diverse and extraordinary stories of artists whose works take you into their world and the world of people living at the limits of their existence.
∆ Ptuj City Gallery
21.00
Art Stays Cinema
IN TRANSIT
SFO…PVG…LHR…MEX…LAX I Chip Lord, 2011
21:30 min, Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Merging social observation with satirical humor, Chip Lord’s work focuses on American myths and icons, from the cult of the automobile to baseball, advertising, suburbia and television. Lord, a founding member of the San Francisco-based multi-media collective Ant Farm, examines how our collective identity and everyday life are defined by a consumer-based, media-driven culture. Lord’s interest in architecture and urban public space has led to the production of a series of video works that document and explore issues of urban geography and planning. In Transit is an observed portrait of the spaces—often considered non-places—of air travel. It moves from San Francisco to Shanghai, Beijing to London, and Frankfurt to Mexico City, though these geographic leaps are barely perceptible in the airport interiors or the travelers’ behavior. The viewer is ultimately left with an image of air travel that is equal parts science fiction and the sublime.
∆ Art Stays stage, Slovenski trg
21.30
Concert
KATALENA
Katalena has performed in virtually every club, concert hall and festival stage in the country, and has also travelled extensively, with performances in the USA, Israel and much of Europe. The band, which has been performing in its original line-up for 22 years, is not stopping now, having recently released their ninth album, “Infectious Songs”.
∆ Art Stays stage, Slovenski trg
SATURDAY I 08 JUL 2023
07.00 – 17.00
Summer Academy
ART STAYS
∆ Dominican Monastery
10.00
Artist Talk and Breakfast
ZAZZARO OTTO
∆ Dominican Monastery
17.00
Exhibition Opening & Artist Talk
PRETIRAN TURIZEM / OVERTOURISM I Riccardo Costantini, Steven Marshall, Igor Molin, Polona Petek, Marek Schovanek
Exhibition of five, mainly painters deals with Overtourism: one of the words that people use most in recent years. Destinations suffer from overtourism, tourism overcrowding and tha’s why: Tourists are Terrorists!
∆ Mihelič Gallery
19.00
Exhibition and Public Installation Opening
BRODOLOM / SHIPWRECK
Ptuj Castle once again hosts one of the main public sculptures of the festival in its courtyard. A shipwreck on the castle hill and artefacts found among the shipwrecks in the castle’s beautiful Baroque galleries await you. Again, a remarkable blend of contemporary art and the rich history of Ptuj.
∆ Ptuj Castle and the Courtyard
20.15
Artist Talk
MARK POŽLEP
Mark Požlep (born 1981, Slovenia) finished his BA and MA at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and completed an Advanced Master’s Degree in Transmedia at the Sint-Lukas Campus in Brussels and HISK in Ghent. He works in the field of visual and performative arts, spatial installations and video art. His artistic practice involves journey-travels, which function both as long-durational performance/endurance art and as an art piece in itself. It is an intense procedural exploration, using the methodology of action-research, cyclical pattern of observation and reflection.
∆ Ptuj Castle Courtyard
20.45
Art Stays Cinema
SOUTHWIND, 2022, 1h 12m
Maxime Berthou, Mark Požlep
The second feature film by Maxime Berthou and Mark Požlep, ‘Southwind’ is a film that emerged from the materialisation of an artistic performance led by the same French-Slovenian duo. This project, which included a descent down the Mississippi aboard a home-made steamboat, was designed to study the economic and ecological impact of corn monoculture on river banks.Their journey began months after one of the biggest floods in American history and ended just weeks before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the end of Donald Trump’s term. As they travel through the “body of the nation”, the film reveals a portrait of America during two crises.
∆ Ptuj Castle Courtyard
22.00 – 00.00
Art Stays Party
AKA Neomi
Since 2011, AKA Neomi’s sound has been evolving and deliberately meandering between indie pop and trip hop, between acoustic ballads and psychedelic noise, and more recently, flirting with disco pop. AKA Neomi has graced many stages since its inception, including MENT, Austria’s Waves Vienna, Portugal’s Westway Lab, Eurosonic in the Netherlands and sharing the stage with Roisin Murphy at her Ljubljana concert.
∆ Ptuj Castle Courtyard
SUNDAY I 09 JUL 2023
07.00 – 17.00
Summer Academy
ART STAYS
∆ Dominican Monastery
10.00 – 12.00
GUIDED TOUR for kids and families
Starting point:
∆ Dominican Monastery
16.00
Exhibition Opening
RAZGLEDNICE / POSTCARDS
The Postcards exhibition takes you on a journey through the history of the Art Stays festival, which has brought many artists from all over the world to Ptuj over the past twenty years. We asked them to send us a postcard as a geography of their “passage” at the Art Stays Festival. An exhibition of diverse works and, above all, memories of Ptuj.
∆ FO.VI Gallery
19.00
Guided Tour by night
Evening guided tour of all Ptuj exhibition venues. A concentrate of the beautiful for those true art lovers who never have time.
Starting point:
∆ Ptuj Castle
21.00
Art Stays Cinema and closing of the opening weekend
SOUTIEN DE FAMILLE, 2020, 1h15m
Maxime Berthou, Mark Požlep
Hogshead 733 is an artistic project by Maxime Berthou and Mark Požlep that includes a journey, a sea adventure, story of heritage, friendship & whiskey. The process follows the restoration of a typical 1941 wooden fishing boat, her last 733 miles sailing journey, and final transformation of the boat, soaked with sea and adventure into two whisky barrels. Every specially chosen stage gives a possibility to research the poetics of a specific manual labor expertise: boat building, sailing, barrel making and whisky production. A journey from Trebeurden Brittany to the island Islay in Scotland was undertaken with 20 stops en route, from 23 August until 21 September, 2015.
∆ Dominican Monastery Courtyard
Opening weekend: 6.–9. 7. 2023
The exhibitions will be on view until: 17. 9. 2023.
