“Remembering and Forgetting: Plečnik Stadium in Ljubljana as a Frozen Social Condition”
“We are currently in a transition from one global system into a totally different one. We live in a high-risk society. We are unbearable especially towards ourselves. It can only take a moment for us to become engaged in a military conflict or be turned into criminal prey. We are now deciding what to do with our freedom. With his conceptual artworks, Jože Barši has been formatting critical strategies for us throughout the last decade. In his Remembering and Forgetting, he establishes, among other things, a research on the Ljubljana stadium.”
“At the City Art Gallery, the neo-conceptualist Jože Barši presented his library on a colour photo wallpaper. When you look at the book titles, you instantly realise that what is before you is Barši’s network of knowledge. Through the titles of his books, a process of epistemic value takes place before us. At the end of the commentary, I plan to write down its titles. I really want to hear what the poetic structure of Barši’s bookshelf sounds like. Despite everything, people are attuned to each other. One of the most important parts of human knowledge is generated via books. With the method of learning, we optimise and store our memory, while forgetting gives rise to the process of our disappearing.”
“As objects, books can be building blocks of artworks. With his books, Jože Barši presents both learning and an in-depth critique of reality. With art, he subversively intervenes in our notion of what it is supposed to be. We recognise his artistic logic in the principles of didactic methodology. In the titles of his books, we hear the sound of his learning method,” wrote Dragan Živadinov in a contribution for Portal plus.