NAME – Readymade

The exhibition NAME – Readymade is focused on the acts of changing one’s personal name and the effects of such a gesture. The works exhibited are generated by reality itself. Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša cut right into the midst of their own realities and the reality of the space and time in which they work. For this purpose they used procedures typical for art – transformation, translation, representation and mimicry. They turned around the classical relational scheme between art and life as it was developed in the 20th century. Art in the previous century is redefined by way of reality entering into artistic contexts without mediation (so that Badiou can define the 20th century as the passion for the real), while Janša, Janša and Janša apply the above-mentioned representational procedures in order to transform their civil status. This has deep consequences on their daily lives as humans and citizens and retroactively on their artwork and the perception of it.

On show are documents – ID cards, passports, birth certificates – that share the hybrid status of valid legal documents and works of art (as the only material traces of an artistic gesture), as well as papers documenting the name change and others focused on the efforts made to preserve this hybrid status of the works on show. By selecting the materials and setting these materials up in a specific way, together with a holistic dramaturgical concept, this exhibition opens up a series of questions: What is real? What is mediated? How do identity and the political manifest in art? What is an art object, and how can its status be certified?