ŠIŠKA, INTERNATIONAL

Espace 315, Centre Georges Pompidou

14 April – 14 July 2010

Curated by Christine Macel (catalog)

Part of Promises of the Past, curated by Christine Macel and Joanna Mitkowska. (catalog)

A hybrid memory of two cinema spaces becomes a vehicle for designing the show at Espace 315 – a distant memory of the Šiška Cinema in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia from the 1970s is mingled with the memory of a similar cinema space in GDR Berlin, Cinema International. The latter, built at a striking location right off of Karl-Marx Allee, served as a model of a new socialist cinema architecture. Šiška Cinema was designed and built around the same time in the late 1950s, as a large neighborhood cinema at the center of a sprawling development of northeastern Ljubljana which started after WW2. The typology of both buildings follows the same logic – a lower level ticket office is contrasted by the upper panoramic lobby wherefrom visitors descent into a cavernous cinema auditorium.

Courtesy of Galerija Gregor Podnar; photography by Georges Mèguerditchian