To mark Slovenia’s biggest cultural holiday, the day on which we pay tribute to Slovene culture and those who create it, numerous institutions are once again offering a broad and varied programme of events.
You can visit the National Gallery to see the exhibition The Masterpieces of the Prague Castle Picture Gallery, featuring works by Old Masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Rubens that once formed part of the imperial collection of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
The City Art Gallery is still showing the exhibition Dragica Čadež. A Story of Wood and Clay, which includes all the most important works by this acclaimed Slovene sculptor. Fans of modern art can visit the City Museum to view the recently opened exhibition When in Doubt, Go to a Museum, curated by Tevž Logar. Drawn from five private collections, the exhibition features works by Constantin Brâncuși, Brassaï, Wassily Kandinsky, Maurizio Cattelan, Diane Arbus, Jean Cocteau, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and many other artists.
CD Gallery at Cankarjev Dom hosts Tête à tête, an exhibition of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most important portrait photographers of the twentieth century. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, is based on a selection of the portraits prepared by the photographer for the book of the same title published to mark his ninetieth birthday.
At 6.00 p.m. the Cankarjev Dom YouTube channel will show a repeat of the online New Year concert by Rudi Bučar, an artist who has been preserving and enriching the cultural heritage of Istria through his music for the last decade and a half. Bučar is an outstanding folk musician with impeccable vocal interpretation and a master of Istrian poetics.
At 8.00 p.m. the YouTube channel of the Ljubljana City Theatre (MGL) will show a performance of Ivan Cankar’s satirical comedy Za narodov blagor [“For the Welfare of the Nation”], starring acclaimed Slovene actors from the MGL’s own company, including: Primož Pirnat, Lotos Vincenc Šparovec, Bernarda Oman, Ajda Smrekar, Uroš Smolej, Iva Kranjc Bagola, Jožef Ropoša.
Also at 8.00 p.m., you can connect to the Third Stage streaming platform to see the online concert Pojezije [the name is a portmanteau of the Slovene words for singing and poetry] by Vlado Kreslin, accompanied by long-term collaborators Mali Bogovi and Milan Kreslin. A regular guest of the Ljubljana festival, Vlado Kreslin is one of Slovenia’s best-known singer-songwriters. Many of his songs are now part of the national repertoire, while some have inspired novels, feature films and even degree theses.
Television channel TV Slovenia 1 will introduce this year’s winners of the country’s most important cultural accolades with Portreti Prešernovih nagrajencev [“Portraits of Prešeren Prize Winners”] (8.00 p.m.). This will be followed at 9.00 p.m. by a repeat broadcast of the Maribor Opera’s performance of Josip Ipavec’s operetta Princesa Vrtoglavka [“The Dizzy Princess”].
