Archive Furioso

Archive Furioso

The conception of the artworks presented within the retrospective exhibition Furioso Archive draws on curatorial practices of contemporary visual art as well as approaches to the preservation of cultural heritage – writing, the book, the image and sculpture. The exhibition employs a range of artistic procedures to construct new content; methods based on contemporary conservation and restoration research into traditional knowledge thus become part of the artistic material.

In a series of redefinitions of images from visual and documentary archival material, the exhibition’s installation sustains tensions between photographic, painterly and sculptural codes in dialogue with moving images. The research processes are inscribed into the artworks themselves, as the technological procedures of bookbinding and other practices are organised into systems within individual modules and the semantic entities of the exhibited works. The project highlights an awareness of transience in relation to contemporary paradigms in science, philosophy and artistic reflection.

The exhibition was conceived by Barbara Novakovič, with artworks created in collaboration with artist Meta Kojc (working in the field of book and paper conservation and restoration), long-term collaborator and architect Vlatka Ljubanović, and interdisciplinary artists and photographers Mare Mutić, Andrej Lamut and others, who co-created numerous projects between 2020 and 2025.

Barbara Novakovič
»Artistic signature of Barbara Novakovič, director, performer, producer and curator, has always been recognized in the Slovenian art scene as subversive, rich in references, humanistically focused and at the same time based on analytical knowledge of Slovenian and world art history. She has always stepped onto the scene in her own rhythm and with themes that, despite their historical relevance for contemporary times, often represented a risk and, so to speak, the "edge of the invisible", which, due to the complexity of the material, could not always be reflected on immediately, but only showed its influence over time.

If sculpture is the image of the living, transferred into staticity and thus into potential eternity, then this exhibition can also be seen in the light of visual stage materials that enter the exhibition space as "architecture of props". They are fragments of an event that was once alive and surrounded by dynamics, but here they are read as exhibits that act as "eternal traces" and tangible imprints of theatrical productions that have, as a whole, irretrievably passed away. The visual images and visual artefacts are parallel dramaturgies within the duration of the event. On the one hand, they are an indispensable complementary part of the whole, on the other hand, they are completely independent elements of expression, symbol and effect.
Zala Dobovšek, PhD, dramaturge, theatrologue, excerpt from the exhibition essay