Exhibitions

The Tobacco Museum offers a glimpse into part of Ljubljana's rich industrial heritage. The museum's presentation was created in close cooperation and from the collections of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana and Tobacco Ljubljana.

At the centre of Valerie Wolf Gang’s artistic research lies the complex relationship between human beings and technology.

The Same Sweat is Still Flowing Through the Same Pores (Circulations) is a multiannual study of space that uses personal narrative to discuss the history and identity of landscape as well as the intertwining of personal and general biographies, including their objects and subjects of study.

In her work, Saša Spačal primarily explores the entanglement of nature and culture, focusing on how all changes are embedded in an infinite number of micro and macro feedback loops, driven by the metabolism of microorganisms, which are invisible to the human eye.

Danilo Milovanović's artworks are literally rooted in the urban tissue, for this is where the artist finds his inspiration and where he is most likely to display his works. He addresses important social issues through works that analyse and question the gentrification and commercialisation processes that take place in urban centres.

The exhibition Movement for Public Speech by artist Polonca Lovšin is the first installation of the project in a gallery space. It is a project in progress that temporarily occupies a public space in an urban environment and encourages participants to communicate and act together.

The project interweaves several threads relating to the history and present of Italian feminism, taking the form of a dual-screen video installation connected to a series of photographs.

Many natural history museums around the globe are facing the dilemma of how to adjust the presentation of their collections in line with new trends. It is not a coincidence that while the public is witnessing a clash between the advocates and opponents of dioramas – with the former finding them as much under threat as animals and ecosystems exhibited, and the latter regarding them as an obsolete propaganda tool used by imperialist forces – Maja Smrekar is seeking to bring the diorama back to life in her project Optical Disturbance.

Certain contemporary artistic approaches and practices, especially those in which echoes of high modernism can be discerned, are sometimes described in terms of transcendental illustrations of “repressed meaning”. Such use of the notion of the unconscious in the field of the visual arts may also be seen as controversial, raising questions of what is concealed and allowing interpretive pirouettes and theories revolving around the sublime and the abstract.

Viktor Bernik’s creative output is endowed with two distinctive features: referencing social reality and the use of various formal solutions. Bernik takes on contemporary society with playfulness and humour, shifting back and forth between the fields of painting and those of drawing, video, graphics as well as spatial installation, intervention and events.

Bojan Fajfrić’s exhibition The Void conveys a specific manner of viewing history by conflating personal memories, collective historical consciousness and the inevitable events, while the use of non-linear timeline in his videos and films often turns them into speculative history.

Robertina Šebjanič engages in investigating living systems (bio art) and sound. Taking on the form of interactive installations on exhibition grounds, her research-based art projects primarily focus on cultural, political, and biological realities of both marine and freshwater ecosystems.

Wayside (A performance yet to happen) is the newest tandem project by Calovsky and Ivanoska, envisioning hypothetical exhibition programme for the unrealised Museum of Modern Art in Skopje, designed by polish architect Oskar Hansen in 1966.

There is something tenacious about the fragility with which Natalija Vujošević communicates her thoughts and emotions–insights and affects–in her referential installations. This determination is provoked by the hardly bearable mission she is conducting, and she conducts it on her own terms: the mission to contemplate banality. Instead of exposing, appropriating or laughing at banality she aims to actually and urgently contemplate it from a rather melancholic, yet critical, attitude. As Benjamin argued, it is in fact the state of ruin that materialistically exposes this remarkable conceptual combination of melancholia and critical vigour.

Benera and Estefan investigate conflict zones, past and present, and how they relate to the territory, water, other natural resources, technological progress and, of course, the eternal common denominator: profit.

"I think that we are, that most Slovenians are very humble, um, that we're nice, that we know how to take care of the environment, most of us do." (Alina, 10 years old)Growing up is political; we are conditioned ideologically and affectively by the social communities that surround us. Referring to this, Dejan Kaludjerović’s art project Conversations: Hula-Hoops, Elastics, Marbles and Sand (2013–present) reminds us of the fact that childhood is not spared from political reality and political thought, however much this period of life, often referred to as the age of innocence, may be devoid of social responsibility for the things that happen and will continue to happen in the future. 

In 1966, it took youth brigades, supported by the wider local community, lottery and the former construction giant Vegrad, less than fifty days to build 2000 square metres of exhibition spaces that were festively opened under the auspices of the United Nations. The twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inspired the title of the exhibition – Peace, Humanity and Friendship among Nations.

London-based Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic is being presented to Ljubljana’s audience with a segment of a tripartite exhibition and film project entitled ‘Spielraum’ that draws on an essay by the Austrian writer, translator and satirist Karl Kraus.

In his artistic practice, Dante Buu (Rožaje, Montenegro) combines photography, text, video, embroidery and performance. His works are underscored by an incessant inquiry into the increasingly blurred boundaries between the private and the public as well as between the voyeuristic and the participatory. In addition, they scrutinise traditional gender roles and associated stereotypes as well as ever more fluid identities in the digital era.

The Rijeka-based art collective Fokus Grupa is presenting itself to Ljubljana’s audience with an exhibition that wraps up its two-month residency at the CC Tobačna 001. In the recent years, Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović, the two members of the collective founded in 2012, have been looking into power relations within the contemporary art field, which is firmly embedded in economic, social and, not least, political reality.