Photo: Pita Projekt
8 – 29 October 2024
P74 Gallery
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Although archives of various kinds have a long history with contemporary art exhibitions, archives that focus on artistic practice specifically are typically found in retrospective exhibitions. These archives usually feature the artist’s sketches, plans, and notes, i.e. the interesting content; less often do they include technical and bureaucratic objects such as failed project proposals and website fragments. The current Pita Project exhibition explores the possibilities of a speculative art practice archive. It examines how such an archive can be created and comprehended. Pita Project focuses on its exhibition archives, questioning to what extent the selected documentation, as well as its interpretation, can accurately represent a particular exhibition.
The Pita Project was initiated as a research platform by Nina Goropečnik and Rea Vogrinčič at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2019. Since its inception, Goropečnik and Vogrinčič have been developing the project utilising various formats (exhibitions, events, lectures, workshops) and media in their work, but primarily, the platform serves as a space for the exhibition and exploration of their artistic practice. By placing the art system at the centre of their artistic interest, they take on different roles typical of that system to examine it and challenge the audiences with its less visible dynamics, limitations, and power positions. The diversity of their projects makes it difficult to clearly and unambiguously describe, categorise and place their activities and practices. That is why, for this project, they focused on documenting and self-archiving their work process, i.e. the derivations that arise during research and artistic creation, as well as other, less artistic aspects.
To highlight the speculative archive of their practice, they opted for the video format for its multi-layered narrative. The video, depicting the two artists making an apple pie, follows the examples of various culinary video tutorials that provide clear instructions and demonstrate the preparation process. Into this apparent clarity, which does not say much about their practice – apart from the pie they occasionally serve at their events and that refers to the name of their project – the authors gradually introduce selected elements of their »archive« through various interventions (text, voice, video within video). Fragmented, incomplete excerpts give only an impression, a foreboding of the documentation of their past exhibitions and projects. These fragments appear more and more frequently in the video, which hints at the impossibility of systematic record keeping and archiving of what is done within the platform and practice itself, as well as the elusiveness of the essence of the original project execution. The human mind as an archive is highly subjective.
Archives are usually associated with physical material. The speculative archive, presented in a video format, challenges this notion, just like websites and social media profiles are becoming a kind of »archiving«. We also tend to disregard the political dimension of an archive; the documents are selected, classified, and then used, but the power is firmly in the hands of the one who makes the selection. In Pita Project’s piece, the decision makers are the artists who deliberately, albeit only slightly, alter the facts and materials, thereby challenging the viewer with a dilemma: What can be understood as accurate or factual within their archive? Meanwhile, utilising the video tutorial principle allows them to continue to form the archive, i.e. to add episodes two, three, and so forth, as an archive is also defined by its incompleteness.
Nina Skumavc
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Pita Project (2019) is a collaborative project by visual artists Nina Goropečnik and Rea Vogrinčič. The platform aims to exhibit and explore their artistic practice through which they take on and explore various roles within the art system. They are interested in understanding the support mechanisms, structures, and systems that make an exhibition. Pita Project has been featured at numerous exhibitions in Slovenia, including the Maribor Art Gallery, Customs House in Nova Gorica, Alkatraz Gallery, P74 Gallery and DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana, as well as in the Simulaker Gallery in Novo Mesto and the Sculpture Department Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University in Ljubljana. The platform was featured in the ETC Magazine in 2024 (No. 3 / Selling Out) and exhibited at the Maribor Art Gallery and MIDAS Ljubljana. The Pita Project earned its artists the 2019–2020 Academy of Fine Arts and Design Award. In 2023, the project was nominated for the OHO Group Award. As of 2020, the project archive is available on pita-project.com and on their Instagram profile @pita_project_250.
