Polona Tratnik was born in 1976 in Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia. She is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and theory of visual culture at the Faculty of Humanistic Studies in Koper, Slovenia. She has received a master’s degree in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2001. She graduated in painting at the same academy in 1999. In 2005 she is the art director of the international festival for contemporary art Break 2.3 New Species (www.break-festival.org), which will take place in Ljubljana in November 2005. She is a secretary of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics (www.drustvo-za-estetiko.si). She has finished a course for curators, organized by the Soros center for contemporary art in 1998 and from 2002 she works as a freelance cultural worker, organizing contemporary art shows and exhibitions. She has been occupied with editing and publishing – has edited and published a book Spaces/Places of Art and was a co-editor of the Slovenian art magazine Art Words, and she has also founded Horizons, a magazine for the philosophy and theory of art. From 1997 she has been organizing lectures and colloquiums on aesthetics, contemporary art and culture. As an artist she has widely exhibited from 1998; she started her career as a painter, but in the last years she is presenting installations thematizing the human body containing living components as human skin cells, micro-organisms, hair etc. She has participated in a number of major exhibition events: L’Art Biotech (2003 Nantes, France), Breakthrough (2004 Den Haag, the Netherlands), Biennale of Electronic Art (2004 Perth, Australia) and The seven sins; Ljubljana – Moscow (2004 Ljubljana, Slovenia).

polona.tratnik@guest.arnes.si
polona.tratnik@break-festival.org