Duba Sambolec

Duba Sambolec has exhibited extensively in numerous solo and group shows, including the Aperto / Venice Biennale (1988) and the São Paulo Biennial (1985). She has received individual and emergency grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York (USA).

At the Biennale, she presents a group of Scores from 2007/2009 that belong to the Situation Report body of work. These visual texts are banners, a possible manifesto of our time, inviting the audience to participate in a performance by reading them individually or aloud in a group.

The works are reminiscent of musical scores where silence – the dots – defines the formation of meaning and paces the comprehending rhythm.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, the visual texts expose cultural characteristics of the socio-economic-political transition from the 1990s to the 2000s. The selected words are guidelines for the individual, and also emphasise the radical neoliberal capitalist values worldwide.

Scores help visualise the impact of profound social changes that affected Slovenian society and offer a subversive methodology to question collective behaviours. This series is also the performative legacy of the long-lost monumental sculptures Sambolec produced in the 1970s and 1980s at the Litostroj metal factory in Ljubljana and exhibited as a “self-organised outdoor installation” in Ljubljana. Some examples of this can be seen in archival photographs as footnotes and physical remnants of this disappeared opus. Embedded in a journey of dedication and effort that points to works that have historically been forced into immateriality, the Scores show Sambolec’s commitment to thinking about art as a shared space of understanding, where multi-media offer new ways of thinking about past and present.