Tadej Pogačar
Tadej Pogačar’s museum actions, held at the Slovene Museum of Natural History in Ljubljana (“Sleeping with Deer,” “Feeding Bear,” “Meditating with Mammoth,” 1993), were collectively called No-Events Actions; these were performed without an audience and aimed at deepening his empathy towards museum artifacts. Since 1993, he has been acting as the director of his fictional Museum of Contemporary Art P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., a flexible organization with no location. He entered, as he puts it, “the museum system and used already existing elements in the museums—their collections as well as ‘non-art’ elements—
so as to create new nonlinear narratives, new knowledge or a different way of thinking about history and time.” The first P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. project consisted of interventions at the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana (1995), at the Museum Boymans Van Beuningen (a project for Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam, 1996), and in other locations. In addition to museums, the artist was also interested in the complex social and economic system found in cities; he therefore collaborated with various marginal social groups such as beggars (“Kings of the Streets,” 1995) and researched parallel economies, forced migrations and human trafficking. In 1999, he initiated a major international project involving sex workers (“Code: Red”) and also organized “The First World Congress of Sex Workers and New Parasitism” (Red Umbrellas March, Venice Biennale, 2001). Art affords Pogačar a space in which to focus on those populations that are excluded from the dominant economy. For Pogačar, dialogue and partnership with numerous organizations, activists, experts, and groups fighting for human rights is crucial, and for each project he employs different methods and procedures. He works with different issues—such as education in “School’s Out” (from 1997 onwards), in which he deals with the issues of knowledge, student-teacher relations, instruction, discipline, and control. He has also invented games such as “MonApoly” (2004), where the players learn not how to accumulate capital but instead about the geopolitics of sex work in the current era of global capitalism, activist organizations, organized crime gangs, and the like. He has furthermore archived street activities in photo series such as “Public Sculpture Archive” (1999–2004), “Street Economy Archives” (Mexico City, 2001) and “Architecture for Fun” (1996–2006). Tadej Pogačar is manager of the P74 Centre and Gallery in Ljubljana, which he founded in 1997. B.S.
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