Marina Gržinić

Gržinić is active in video art and media art since 1982. She works in collaboration with Aina Šmid, art historian and artist from Ljubljana.

In Ljubljana, she engaged in the constitution of what is today known as the Ljubljana alternative or subcultural movement that, in the 1980s, developed new artistic practices,(like video and performance) politically engaged movements such as the homosexual gay and lesbian scene, and many other processes that were constitutive for the discussion of the position of art and culture in Slovenia in connection with demands and struggles for a political emancipated life that bypasses the middle class bourgeoisie perception of the Slovenian society and reality.

Marina Gržinić (born 1958) is a philosopher, theoretician and artist from Ljubljana. She is a prominent contemporary theoretical and critical figure in Slovenia. Since 1993 she is employed at the Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific and Research C |title= enter of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts (short ZRC-SAZU in Slovenian and SRC-SASA in English). Today, she serves as a professor and research adviser. For her scientific work, she has received the Golden SASA sign in 2007. Since 2003, she has also served as Full Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. She publishes extensively, lectures worldwide, and is involved in video art since 1982.

Marina Gržinić was born in 1958 in Rijeka (Yugoslavia), in present-day Croatia. She was raised in an Italian minority family. She moved alone to Ljubljana at the age of seventeen (after completing her gymnasium studies in Rijeka). She received her Bachelor of Arts in analytical sociology in 1985, completed her Master of Arts in 1991 at the Faculty of Arts, and received her doctoral title in 1995 from the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. The title of her dissertation was Virtual Reality: Achronic Time, Paraspace and Simulation. Gržinić was one of the first, if not the first in Slovenia and maybe ex-Yugoslavia, with a doctorate in philosophy and virtual reality, cyberspace, cyberfeminism (Haraway), postcolonial theory (Trinh T. Minh-ha), French structuralism and media theory (Baudrillard, Couchot, Klonaris/Thomadaki, Virilio, etc.). In the period from 1997 to 1998 she completed her postdoctoral academic training in Japan, at the University of Tokyo (she received the Japan government grant, JSPS) and spent a year with Professor Machiko Kusahara.

From 25.11.2022 to 28.2.2023 2022, the Loža Gallery Koper, Slovenia, hosts a major retrospective exhibition of works and visual installations by Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid, from 1982 to 2022, entitled ODPADNIŠKE ZGODOVINE / STORIE DISSIDENTI / DISSIDENT HISTORIES, curated by Mara Ambrožič Verderber. https://www.obalne-galerije.si/marina-grzinic-aina-smid-odpadniske-zgodovine/ A comprehensive study by Tjaša Kancler is published in the leaflet for the exhibition and in the reader.