Slovenia (Republic of)

Garden Secret for You is ushered into the historical context of Venice as a foreign body, an alien and unexpected element. An enigmatic entity of a highly specific exterior, it speaks about itself, recounting the story of its entry into the sphere of art, while at the same time (indirectly) addressing something else. Garden Secret for You is both an object of sculptural quality and a functional one, a piece of architecture acting as a sort of clandestine Slovenian national pavilion. Both an abstract, aesthetic entity and a usable one, the object is a paradigmatic nomad, switching from one register to another, simultaneously functioning in different systems and resisting its reduction to one particular context or meaning. In this way it synchronously represents an unusual parallel with what is at the centre of the paradigm of art: it is an object alien to itself, alienating as a consequence the experience of everyone who encounters it. Garden Secret for You speaks of the constitutive foreignness that is at the heart of the practice of art, both in its creation and experience. By experiencing it the visitor must become something or someone else, the same as the object in question, a stranger to him/ herself, able to withstand the tantalising task of ambivalence.