Maja Smrekar

bio | Maja Smrekar (Slovenia, 1978) is a transdisciplinary artist whose work overlaps visual arts, performance and scientific fields with contributions to knowledge exchanged within lectures, talks and texts. She has been able to use her artistic voice to speak on environmental challenges, ecofeminism, artificial intelligence, interspecies collaboration and civil society in the age of postcolonial globalisation. Accordingly, she likes to challenge binary oppositions and patriarchal structures, that juxtapose ideological remnants and geo-political signifiers. She has exhibited in media arts and fine arts museum contexts such as ZKM Karlsruhe (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (Ljubljana, Slovenia), The National Museum of XXI Century Arts – Maxxi (Rome, Italy), MAK Vienna / Vienna Art Week and Künstlerhaus Wien (Austria), Het Neuwe Institut (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Musee de l’Homme (Paris, France), Latvian National Arts Museum (Riga, Latvia), RMIT Gallery Melbourne (Australia), Zuercher Gallery / Frieze New York (USA), Art Laboratory Berlin (Germany), Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing (China), and Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana, Slovenia), as well as festivals and conferences such as Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Transmediale (Berlin, Germany), Click festival (Elsinore, Denmark), Falling Walls (Berlin, Germany), Rencontres Bandits-Mages (Bourges, France), and Musrarra Mix (Jerusalem, Israel). Over the last 10 years, her artistic research has been focussing on collaborations with institutions such as the Institute of Medical Biochemistry, the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, the Laboratory for Bio Cybernetics, and the Department of Forestry (all at the University of Ljubljana), the Department of Freshwater and Terrestrial Ecosystems (National Institute of Biology in Ljubljana, Slovenia) and with the Department of Zoology in Life Sciences at The Humboldt-University Berlin. In 2014 she collaborated with the ethologist and animal wrangler Jean Phillipe Varin, at the JACANA Wildlife Studios in Saint Montaine, France. Since 2020 she has been collaborating with the Embodied Systems for Robotics and Learning Department at the University of Southern Denmark. Among other awards, she has won 1^st Prize at the Cynetart festival 2012, awarded by Hellerau – European Centre for Arts (Dresden, Germany), Honorary Mention at the Ars Electronica festival 2013 (Linz, Austria), and Golden Bird Award 2013 (Ljubljana, Slovenia), She was the winner of the Prix Ars Electronica – Golden Nica 2017 in Hybrid Art (Linz, Austria). In 2018 she was awarded a Prešeren Foundation Award, the highest national award for artistic achievements given by the Republic of Slovenia (Ljubljana, Slovenia). In 2020 she was selected as the Science Breakthrough of the Year 2020 Finalist by the Falling Walls Foundation (Berlin, Germany). Maja Smrekar lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.