Barši's art practices have always been conceptually oriented in the direction of expanding the boundaries of understanding the work of art. In recent years, he has negated the notion of the work of art as a representative aesthetic object and has become more concerned with the questions of how human thought presents itself as an autonomous art object and how one can view, think and read such a work of art. In his latest project, as part of his research into the workings of human thought, he touches on two important factors – learning and forgetting, which he juxtaposes in the exhibition in their indispensable interdependence.

The exhibition is conceived as a path through the intellectual learning process that the artist experiences in reading or writing, in contact with people, in observing nature and social change. Through a variety of topics, he focuses particularly on learning that takes place at an unconscious level, in the context of everyday interpersonal relationships, within the immediate sensory perception of the individual. At the same time, he reflects critically on the mere loading of factual data, which turns human memory into a storehouse of the superfluous and impedes the flow of thought. To this, he adds the field of unresolved social conflicts and introduces forgetting as their buffer as well as a meaningful act that empties a person's store of memory, frees it up for new ideas and new learning. As a metaphor for this process, he uses the laws of death and rebirth in nature in the project, with plants overgrowing a space and hence new life entering the space. Barši understands overgrowth as a poetic gesture of oblivion and makes the viewer face a series of surprises and questions in the exhibition – he encourages a new reading of old facts, sets the viewer up with their inverted, overlooked side, presents a different view of the same thing, diverts the attention. He plays with the viewer's perception and tests his curiosity and sensual motivation, which, along with forgetting, are necessary for successful learning. He thus combines two seemingly mutually exclusive intellectual activities into an inseparable whole.

The exhibition includes the artist's numerous drawings, notebooks, book, wall as well as spatial interventions, text works, objects and documentation from his personal archive. It is accompanied by an exhibition programme of a participatory nature that also includes performative practices, from lectures to readings, posted as announcements and part of the installation itself. Barši conceived the exhibition in the time of the epidemic, which we all want to forget, but which has nevertheless allowed for many weighty reflections on the world we live in.

Jože Barši: Learning and Forgetting

Learning and Forgetting (City Art Gallery Ljubljana, 2021) was the first major solo presentation by the architect, sculptor and educator Jože Barši since 2013. It provided an insight into ...