FTPB, group exhibition

Join us for the opening of the group exhibition FTPB, on Friday, 25 September 2015, at 8 pm at the KiBela Gallery of the Multimedia Center KIBLA. The exhibition will feature a selection of authors from this year’s edition of the Fotopub contemporary photography festival held in Novo mesto.

Exhibiting authors: Iza Pavlina (SI), Tim Cullmann (DE), Alessandro Calabrese (IT), The Cool Couple (IT), Douglas Mandry (CH), Aladin Borioli (CH), Craig Wye (UK).

From the ruins of a well-known documentary photography festival emerged a renewed artist-run Fotopub. The motive behind our newly established team is to thicken the focus of the festival onto contemporary photography, to promote Slovenian and international photographers of the younger generation and to build bridges between professionals and the public. Fotopub is therefore attempting to develop a necessary platform, intended for connecting young artists and professionals with their already established colleagues, thus evoking a constructive dialogue amongst them. In our efforts to expand the festival in the future, we started off in Novo mesto with the infrastructure built by the previous festival, but more importantly, we see its potential to become an international key player in the development of the emerging contemporary photography.

This year’s program of six exhibitions reaped the fruits of the first re-contextualized edition of the festival as it helped to define our role and ethos that we want to develop in the future years. The exhibition summarizes the six shows we organized in August and is a fitting representative of the practices we pursue to feature. Subsequently, this exhibition in Maribor shows a qualitatively upgraded level of awareness of contemporary photographic practice – from differently reconfigured and utilized mediums to its considered and repeatedly conceptual presentations.

The spirit of a good art festival could be arguably seen in its upgrade, improvement and an eternal doubt, which stimulates the audience to witness and question a contemporary cultural fetishism. Whenever the content and the appearance of an object arises above a horizon of everyday usage, its practical value changes into a catharsis of idolizing the privileged. Repeatability of this sort of reversal is obviously common in the art world, although it needs a grip and a continuously perfect execution, to become a qualitative and, naturally, culturally and educationally instrumental factor of perception of contemporary art.

A known tradition in the Slovenian art scene, where fresh approaches and usage of distinctively different, and therefore qualitatively created and presented works, hardly find its place of presentation. It is important that the enthusiasm of young and the euphoria of older people unite and subsequently contribute to the progress and materialization of the Slovenian contemporary creativity, which can unite with the spirit of international authors around the world.
Eva Pavlič Seifert, Dušan Smodej, Jure Kastelic, Tadej Vindiš

> More about the festival at www.fotopub.com