THE GULAG INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART AND CULTURES

Gulag is a group of visual and sound artists, poets and social scientists who decided to develop their projects with the help of others. Gulag is also a production house for wider visual, sound and performative art, some of which is combined with poetry. We organise public discussions and workshops to reflect on our work and contemporary art. Our main commitment is to find artistic solutions to reflect, cope with, ironise, distort and change our social environment; to react with engaged action to radical changes currently happening in our society.

We engage in

Performances and street interventions monitoring social control, underlying violence and intercultural repression

Emerging art exhibitions with a special focus on the body, gender, sculpturing and new media

Innovative poetry workshops and performances combined with video, visual and sound art

New ways to expose and radicalise poetry

Discussions, lectures and seminars on contemporary art practices

New forms of cooperation among visual, sound & performative art and literature

Sculptures, puppets, stage props and scenography, mascots, death masks

Artist books

History

The Gulag Institute for Contemporary Arts and Cultures was founded in 2007 as a legal successor to the Blue Circle Institute for Visual and Multimedia Research / Modri krog (founded in 1999) which during the 1990s mostly operated in the area of the northern Slovenian city of Kranj. BLUE CIRCLE chiefly organised student exhibitions and festivals. Important collaborations included initiating and organising the first and second International Student Festival of Sculptures (Ljubljana, Sežana and Središče; main organiser Student Organisation in Ljubljana), resulting in the installation of sculptures made of stone, aluminium and ceramic tiles in public spaces around Slovenia.