draft version

term family
narrator Igor Španjol
published 9 January 2017

In 1971, the OHO artists, along with their families, took up residence on an abandoned farm in the willage of Šempas in the western part of Slovenia. The commune chose a name for itself as an artist group only when it was invited to publicly present its life and work: The Šempas Family. The decisive input here was the root of the Slovene word družina (family), which is družiti se, to come together. The Šempas Family dissolved in 1979 when it became an »ordinary« family of Marko Pogačnik. On a grand family photograph that was taken at Cetinje Biennial in Montenegro in 1994, members of the family of Jusuf Hadžifejzović and his friends gathered for the first time after three years of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – and this photograph has become a basis of his continuous performance through the years that followed. On the other hand, Family is a Slovenian weekly Roman Catholic Magazine, launched in 1952. In the Name of the Family is conservative organization established in Croatia in 2013 to »promote family values and to protect dignity of the family«. Family was one of the nominees for word of the year in Slovenia. Some of the Glossary participants are called Global family narrators. It seems like a good time to ask: how can artist's uses of the family confront its traditional and subvert its neoconservative definitions?

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