Festival of Performance

The Performance Festival, which was first conceived at Nova pošta (Maska Ljubljana and the Slovenian Youth Theatre) in 2019 under the curatorial direction of Urška Brodar and Janez Janša, as a response to stereotypical, pogromist and dismissive views of contemporary art, offered our answer to the question of what performance is, and thus also sought to contribute to its more visible positioning in the field of contemporary art practices. Next time, we responded to the increasingly nationalistic and conservative social climate in Slovenia with the artistic gesture Peak (2021, 2022), curated by Urška Brodar and Katarina Stegnar. In 2023, however, Brodar and Stegnar invited selected artists to reflect on the theme of care – with the starting point in Bojana Kunst’ s bookThe Life of Art: the Transverse Lines of Care.

At the same time, with the Performance Festival we tried to open a space for reflection on the process of “festivalization” of art, which has engulfed Slovenia in recent years and has almost devalued the concept of the festival and distracted people from making art. That is why with the Performance Festival we focused on thorough conceptual reflections and long-term research processes, as well as on the artistic gesture of a bold, unique and unrepeatable intervention in public space.