I Feel Love

The work Tourists Welcome (I Feel Love) was initially developed within the context of Jasmina Cibic’s site-specific interventions at Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport. It appropriated the, at the time, newly assigned slogan of the Republic of Slovenia (“I feel Slovenia”), directly evocative of the 1980s hit by Donna Summer. Cibic delegated the famous disco song to the state police orchestra, which performed it as a looped sculpture positioned within the airport terminal—the first point of contact between the country and the foreign visitor.

The immanence of Cibic’s site- and context-specific practice implies an immediate re-articulation in the transfer of the work to the context of the 7th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia: the artwork is presented on the occasion of the Triennial’s final day, placed in the entry hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana. In this way, an art event becomes solidified into a canonised moment in the history of art, functioning as a kind of welcoming committee for the spectator arriving to view the “gems” of a national understanding of contemporary art.

Cibic’s intervention is not motivated by criticism of a particular art institution, but rather by a critique of the Institution as a structure—a site capable of producing knowledge and assigning art phenomena their “proper” place within the system. Resilience, which serves as the contextual framework of this year’s Triennial, is located here within the artwork itself: although the work cannot extricate itself from the system that determines its fate, it nevertheless retains the capacity to unmask the political and institutional mechanisms that shape our perception of truth.

Vladimir Vidmar