School's Out
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- School's Out
- 1997-2010
- installation of 7 photo collages and 9 paperworks, various materials and sizes
“School’s Out” was originally conceived in 1997 as a participatory, site-specific project in which the students of the Šentvid Gymnasium in Ljubljana were active participants. Discreet installations (featuring teaching materials, instructional aids, everyday objects, etc.) were set up in a number of classrooms; they problematized the issues of knowledge, student-teacher relations, instruction, discipline, and control. The “School’s Out” series of works (1997–2010) were created out of a desire to explore the modern history of scholastic instruction through subjective visual memory. To this end, they employ archival images from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s that depict the processes of teaching, discipline, control, and so on; these images are juxtaposed with objects and collages. The objects are educational tools and aids that point clearly to the period of their origin—namely, the period of socialism and the common state of Yugoslavia (e.g. a triangle with its centre cut out in the shape of Yugoslavia, maps, etc.); the collages, meanwhile, make themes of classifications, visual structures, color systems, fragments of illustrations from textbooks, and the like. The narrative strategy applied in the collages is based on the use of repetition, empty space, nonsense, clichés, and humor. The other works comprising the “School’s Out” installation include drawings, empty sheets of paper, cut-outs (empty frames), texts from school notebooks and similar items. B.S.