Photo: Borut Peterlin
Maja Smrekar was born 1978 in Slovenia. In 2005 she graduated at the Sculpture Department of Fine Art and Design Academy in collaboration with the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and holds Master of Arts in New Media since 2016. She has been involved in dog behavior studies by applying canine sports training for the last five years. In her work she has been dwelling on two main topics: the parallel evolution within a relationship wolf – human – dog on one, and the Sixth big species extinction on the other side. Leading different collaborators, composing artistic concepts and participating in their realizations, her professional aim is to communicate the crosssections of art and science to the broad public through a plethora of interactive installations, performances, workshops, lectures and texts as their outcomes.
She has been collaborating with different researchers, teams and individuals at the fields of natural sciences, such as the Institute of Biochemistry at the Medical Faculty of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Radiation and Optics Laboratory and Laboratory for Biocybernetics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Biotechnology and Department of Forestry at the Biotechnical Faculty, all within the University of Ljubljana, Department of Freshwater and Terrestrial Ecosystems at the National Institute of Biology in Ljubljana, Slovenia and the Department of Biology at the Faculty of Life Sciences at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany. Among others, she has been artistically collaborating with Ars Eletronica (Linz/Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe/Germany), Transmediale (Berlin/Germany), Rixc (Riga/Latvia), MK Gallery (Milton Keynes/United Kingdom), Art Laboratory Berlin (Berlin/Germany), Musée de l`Homme (Paris/France), Het Neuwe Institut (Rotterdam/The Netherlands) and for the last ten years with Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana / Slovenia.
In 2010 she organised international festival HAIP10/New Nature, which took place at Multimedia Centre Cyberpipe in Ljubljana where she has been active as an artistic director for three years. She has been prior an editor in chief of a radio show on contemporary art called The Art_Area at the Radio Študent in Ljubljana for two years. She has been awarded for her work at the Cynetart festival 2012 by the European Centre for Arts Hellerau (Dresden/Germany) with the 1st prize, Honorary mention at the Ars Electronica festival 2013 (Linz/Austria), as well as the Golden Bird Award 2013 – the national award for special achivements at the field of visual art by the Liberal Academy and an Award of the Fine Art and Design Academy (both in Ljubljana/Slovenia). Maja Smrekar lives and works between Ljubljana, Slovenia and Berlin, Germany.