Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The Slovenj Gradec Arts Pavilion opened in 1957 in the city of the same name that, at the time, had a population of 4,000 inhabitants. During that socialist period, museums and galleries were established in relatively small communities in Yugoslavia in order to decentralize and expand the population’s access to art and culture. The exhibition program sponsored by the United Nations, which was started in the early 1960s, was directed by the artist Karel Pečko. The 1975 edition, which is referred to in the telegram, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the founding of the UN in 1945 and—unlike earlier, more traditional versions—included a section devoted to Conceptual art, particularly to works that were focused on institutional criticism. Jorge Glusberg was the guest curator for the selection of Latin American artists. [Andreja Hribernik and Katarina Hergold Germ, “International Exhibitions at the Art Pavilion Slovenj Gradec–Collaborations with Third World Countries,” in Tamara Soban, ed. and trans. Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2019), 83-85].
The presentation of CAYC-affiliated artists in that city—which, at the time, was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—was significant under the circumstances, given the Cold War and the introduction throughout Latin America of the so-called Theory of Dependence, which explained that the poverty the region’s countries were experiencing was a result of the oppression exerted by the major world powers. The eagerness to create links between Latin American and Eastern European art was a fundamental part of the CAYC’s strategy for international exchange. The center advocated a “unity of strengths” among local art scenes in what were considered Third World countries. That is, what Glusberg saw as a form of art that expressed the specific problems these countries had in common.
Given the above, it is particularly important to point out that, in the telegram that was reproduced in the newsletter, the full title of the exhibition included the description “International exhibition of committed figurative art”—a clear acknowledgement of political awareness.
