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The Place where Symptoms become Real: Cosmonauts, Explosives, and Hand-Made
Sausages. Impressions from Ljubljana, Slovenia, 7-12 July 1998

Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>

Body and the East

Arriving on the "sunny side of the Alps" (slogan of the Slovenian
tourism association), I was welcomed by heavy rain which wouldn't stop
until the next day. The reason for my trip to Ljubljana was the opening
of the exhibition "Body and the East" at Moderna Galerija, one of the
leading institutions of contemporary art in Slovenia. The exhibition
covers Body Art in Eastern Europe from the 1960s through the present,
and was curated by Zdenka Badovinac, director of Moderna Galerija, and
collaborators from various East European countries. I curated the
section on the former GDR, and for this section I selected only the
group "Autoperforationsartisten" (Else Gabriel, Micha Brendel, Rainer
Goerss, Via Lewandowsky), a wild bunch from 1980s Dresden, and Via
Lewandowsky's latest work "The Artist