U3 Triennial of Contemporary Slovene Arts

Infobox Festival

The U3 Triennial of Contemporary Slovene Arts was established in 1994 by the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana with the aim of presenting the current visual arts scene through the perspective of one person – a selected curator whose nationality would alternate from Triennial to Triennial, with someone of Slovene extraction leading one Triennal and someone of a different nationality leading the next.

The 1994 curator was Slovene art historian and critic Professor Dr Tomaž Brejc, and the 1997 curator was Peter Weibel, a multimedia curator and writer active at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe. Themes in 1997 were dislocation, discommunication, medialisation and contextualisation, and a critique of the museum institution and art system. The 2000 Triennial, entitled 'Vulgata', was conceived by young Slovene gallerist and curator Gregor Podnar (see ŠKUC Gallery and Gregor Podnar Gallery), and took as its theme Slovene national identity based on social constructs. The 4th Triennial of 2003 was curated by Christine Van Assche, a new media curator from the Musée national d'art moderne at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, and presented the work of 20 Slovene artists - Bojan Brecelj, Martin Bricelj, Vuk Ćosić, Davide Grassi & Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman, Tomaž Gregorič, Dejan Habicht & Tanja Lažetić, Janez Janša (formerly known as Žiga Kariž), Andreja Kulunčić, Borut Peterlin, Franc Purg, Tobias Putrih, Random Logic, Son:DA, Sašo Vrabič and Tao Grega Sambolec Vrhovec - under the title 'Here and There'. Several artists 'escaped' the museum space installation and presented their works on jumbo billboards in the streets, on television, as projections onto the museum wall, as music (Random Logic), in theatre spaces and on the Internet, for example: [[1]], and [[2]]

The 2006 U3 curator was Jurij Krpan (Kapelica Gallery). The exhibition presented 11 selected intermedia art projects, featuring Viktor Bernik, BridA, Srečo Dragan, Iztok Holc, Andrej Kamnik and Daan Roosegaarde, Nika Oblak and Primož Novak in collaboration with Stefan Doepner, Mark Požlep, Franc Purg and Sara Heitlinger, Sašo Sedlaček, Polona Tratnik, and Metka Zupanič. Other modules at U3 2006 included a presentation of good practices, a presentation of art works, an analysis of the 20th-century production situation, public presentations, panel discussions, talks and performances. Several representatives of international art institutions, centres, organisations and networks presented their artist-in-residence programmes.