Artist and media critic Alessandro Ludovico interviews the three artists named Janez Janša. It’s no coincidence that they have the same name and not by chance that they share it with the former Slovenian Prime minister: they deliberately and officially changed the names they’d had from birth to Janez Janša. They also joined the right-wing SDS party led by their homonymous counterpart. After that they experienced a “visible disappearance” from having canceled their previous names but simultaneously having gained huge visibility thanks to their radical gesture. Changing your name is similar to dying: it affects more people other than just ...

Born Digital is a benefit auction and an online exhibition made to support the activities of the Link Art Center on the online auction platform Paddle8. The event—the first with this focus taking place in Europe on this scale—includes more than 50 works kindly provided by 33 artists. For two weeks long, from April 15 to April 30, 2014, people and collectors are invited to visit the works and eventually to bid to support the artists and the organizers. The Link Art Center is the first Italian organization to collaborate with Paddle8, an online auction house that partners with non-profit organizations ...

In the summer of 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša,” the name of the right-wing Prime Minister at that time. Since then, the artists have presented their works as performances, exhibitions and a film documentary, and have continued with their investigation of “What’s in a name?” Starting from this famous Shakespearian question, four eminent European philosophers – Austrian Robert Pfaller and Slovenians Mladen Dolar, Jela Krečič and Slavoj Žižek – confront the implications of the Janšas’ name change and its consequences in four essays. Ten years of artistic and real life activity, here illustrated by ...

In 2007, three Slovenian artists joined the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and officially changed their names to Janez Janša. While they renamed themselves for personal reasons, the boundaries between their lives and their art began to blur in numerous and unforeseen ways. The catalogue of Janez Janša® – the anthological exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta and presented in 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) in Ljubljana – presents a comprehensive selection of works and projects produced by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša over the last ten years – most of them arising as collateral effects of ...

Just what is it that leads many contemporary artists to restage historic events great and small, performances of the past, and sometimes even imaginary events? Are they possessed by the post-modern demon? (albeit belatedly…) Does this practice spring from a cynical awareness of the decline of values, the surrender—be it dismal or joyful, it makes little difference—to the logic of the society of spectacle? Is it yet another variation of Francis Fukuyama’s bitter prophecy of “the end of history”? Or is it simply the end of the modern myth of the “originality” of the work of art, a further confirmation of the ...

In the summer 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša.” This life event introduced a break into their artistic practice, which evolved into one of the most radical explorations of life in the age of biopolitics. Featuring a text by Domenico Quaranta, this book documents and discusses their recent work, a continuum that is sometimes produced by companies and institutions as a reaction to their life, sometimes by isolating and documenting specific moments in their life. ID cards, passports and bank cards become the means of a research that undermines the very concepts of “art” ...

In the summer of 2007, three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. They have claimed that it was not for artistic purposes but was an intimate, personal decision. Art curator and critic Domenico Quaranta takes them seriously, quoting Boris Groys: in today’s biopolitical age, life can be an art form. The three Janšas have gone beyond this, as they have canceled the border between art and life. Making life and art coincide has many consequences, for example in the Troika exhibition, by presenting their original and valid ID cards, passports and bank cards as artworks, they ...