Stories Beyond the Radar

Stories Beyond the Radar conference takes place around Walid Raad’s exhibition at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, where stories, photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations explore how worlds are built, inhabited, and narrated, and how objects, images, and stories shape both our historical and imaginary landscapes.  

The conference examines how contemporary art and theory respond to a reality marked by multiple temporalities—labyrinthine, non-linear, digital, instantaneous, eternal, asynchronous, and speculative, among others—and asks how we might rethink art history, traditions, and the museums of the future under such conditions.

The conference refers to the present time as a manifestly interrupted one, not only because we live in a time of interrupted attention but for deeper structural reasons: Whereas modernity oriented itself toward the future and conceived time as continuity and progress, today time appears as a series of breaks, folds, repetitions, and pauses. Moreover, space is no longer a fixed territory, but a field of simultaneous and sometimes conflicting presences.

Leaning on the 2006 exhibition Interrupted Histories at Moderna galerija—which brought Eastern European artists into dialogue with artists from the Middle East—the conference examines artistic practices emerging from what we call “spaces of interrupted histories.” In this context, the very conditions for sustaining long-term historical narratives have been disrupted by centuries of economic, religious, and epistemological struggle. While some artists from these regions register the absence and continual undermining of certain traditions as scenes of individual and collective trauma, of forces affecting subjects in the world, others view this absence as symptomatic of more pervasive, insidious, and fracturing forces where the very concept of “the world” begins to come apart.

Walid Raad’s exhibition also features collages by Fadwa Hassoun, a former Lebanese Army intelligence officer who assigned code names to local and international leaders during the Lebanese Civil War. These collages represent a “vocabulary” that has not been incorporated into knowledge systems.

Artists are developing similar “counter-vocabularies” in times of increasing violence when new forms of codifying cultural heritage are constantly emerging—along with new ways of colonizing knowledge, especially with the help of AI. In our dangerous times, one of the important strategies is to avoid the radar of these categorization and commodification processes, and learn to use our imagination, knowledge and technology differently in the service of “counterintelligence activities.”

Participants: Rana Anani, Inke Arns, Zdenka Badovinac, Fares Chalabi, Goran Đorđević, Vladan Joler, Bara Kolenc, Vasif Kortun , Bojana Piškur, Omnia El Shakry, Alenka Zupančič, Jalal Toufic

Concept: Zdenka Badovinac