Questions, posed to public before the setting of the Reading Room

I’m an artist - a sculptress from Ljubljana, Slovenia. I’m sending you this letter to ask you to participate in my project for the triennale of art that take place in Ljubljana this winter. I want to ask different people three questions about art, about present and past.

Five years ago the war in the Balkans (in my neighborhood, in my ex-homecountry) became my new reality. The art, the thing which was, till then, one of the most if not the most important thing in my life, lost it’s value and became the less important in the world. I stopped making sculpture, went to refugee - camps and worked with Bosnian refugees for two years.
I changed myself a lot in these years, my point of view to the world changed and of course to art. My work changed. I don’t make sculpture anymore. I’m interested in other things, I do other things. I’m back to the art, though, but I see things other way. People were asking me: What happened to your sculpture , I was answering with a question: What happened to you, did you go through some changes in this time? I’m interested in this changings (or no-changings). What happened to your sculpture, your book, your faith. So, What happened to You?

The second question has to do with the present. How to define the present. Today as present, today as contemporare, today as a difference between yesterday and tomorrow, today as eternity... Is there a book, a film, some music..., that would define Today as you see it?

The third question is about art - today. What is this? What is the meaning of art in today’s world or in the world in general? What is contemporary art and what all could art be in our present? I’m interested in your personal view.

I send these questions to you and many other people, who, in their lives, do very different things. Some of them are professionally related to the art, some of them are active spectators and some of them meet art almost unconsciously. I’m interested in what we have to tell or show to each other. Do you have questions for the rest of us?

In the gallery, I’ve set a reading room, where these answers are going to be set to be read, seen, heard. The visitor has an opportunity to read your short answer or a book you’ll suggest (or land?), to see a videotape you might send, or to touch an object somebody would give as his answer. He is allowed to read daily newspaper and seek for an answer there. He can seek for the answer sitting in the Room with a View (a view to the rest of the exhibition) in the Room with Memory in the Room with an Ear, at the reading-writing table, or simply sitting there, talking to other visitors. Of course the visitor can leave his own answers there.

Rene Rusjan > Ljubljana, 15th November, 1997