Group exhibition By the Way Important
09
June
2025
>
27
June
2025
You are kindly invited to the opening of the group exhibition of students of Academy of Fine Arts and Design, "By the Way Important", on Monday, 9 June, at 7 pm, at Alkatraz Gallery, ACC Metelkova mesto. The exhibition features Kalina Naskovski Perne & Kristian Župan, the BRAVO collective (Pika Basaj, Ana and Neža Urbiha), Klara Kracina and Vita Eva Wesseisen. The project is a part of Empowernemt of Young Artists unit that is carried out in coproduction with Academy of Fine Arts and Design of Univrsity of Ljubljana.
Kalina Naskovski Perne & Kristian Župan, BRAVO collective (Pika Basaj, Ana and Neža Urbiha), Klara Kracina, Vita Eva Wesseisen
The Alkatraz Gallery has been continuously collaborating with the youngest generation of artists who study at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. We see the artworks that comprise this year's exhibition of the Academy's students as an opportunity to view some of the images of our time and place that are portrayed in the works of young artists who, although they do not aspire to tell universal or ambitious stories, (paradoxically) reveal a number of important ideas about the moods and values of contemporaneity. In the exhibition, we see everyday props, trivial objects, references to internal stories, associations and jokes. Their spirit is poetically described by Olja Simčić Jerele: The fog of repetition. My life. Same route, same bus, same job, same uni. I wade through it, with horse blinkers on. The focus, which revolves around banal routines and repetitive stories, should not deceive us. Although we will not see loud demands for a fairer order of things in the exhibition, this does not mean that the young artists are only absorbed in their intimate worlds. On the contrary: there is no shortage of views that reflect a unique, critical view of reality, which does indeed use the locality of subjective experience as a starting point, but which develops into an indirect rebellion that is not lacking in humour and irony.
Klara Kracina holds a mirror up to the environment in which the photographs were taken in her series People You May Know (2024), which is a peculiar combination of a homage and a photo archive of the Facebook page of the Africa Trebnje discotheque, and consists of a spatial installation, monotypes and oil on canvas paintings. The Alkatraz Gallery features her monotypes and a spatial installation that can exist on their own, but, simultaneously, form a dialogue with the painting work of the series, which is not included in the exhibition. In the works of art we see questionable aesthetic choices, modes of self-presentation, methods of relaxation and leisure, as well as honest moments of unbridled passion that provoke nostalgic irony. The archival element of observation through an anthropological lens is reminiscent of the artist's initiative of collecting found notes from strangers (presented in the Zin Notes collection at DobraVaga Gallery) and other attempts to document phenomena of social life that may seem trivial and insignificant, but which the artist treats in a way that, through her characteristic humour, encourages the viewer to reflect on broader themes of collective memory and national consciousness. Klara Kracina's placement is complemented by the installation Bar Table (2025), which evokes for the visitor the ghost of parties and their own questionable decisions under the influence of intoxicating substances from her personal history. Thus, in one moment, in a monumental way, immortalised in a painting, graphic or installation work, the artist points out something that could provoke mockery in the viewer, and in the next moment we, as the viewers, have already connected what we have seen with our own experiences and realised that the joke is actually a joke at our expense and that we are not so different as individuals.
The representatives of the BRAVO collective (Ana Urbiha, Neža Urbiha, Pika Basaj) also draw inspiration from everyday life. Their non-glamorous sculptures act as a visually powerful counterpoint to the content of reality, which is unexciting: food and drink, pills, clothes, animal and human masks. The artists use the manufactured objects or sculptures in scenographic sequences in order to create fictional, humorous stories that reflect their close interconnectedness. As viewers, observing their playful experiments, we perceive an implicit emotional undertone that is tied to their relationships. The objects are part of a banal routine, but they have an auto-ironic connotation, because through ingenious inserts, such as, for instance, the naming of newly invented pills (The Go Berserk Pills, part of the project To Withdraw (2022)), they bring the viewer closer to their mutually developed world of fiction, which is, at the same time, questioned and compared to the greyness of everyday life. An original way of observing the interaction and fusion of identities and interpersonal dynamics through experimentation with the potentiality of the medium itself also incidentally brings an honest portrait of the time and space occupied by the artworks with the bare reality of everyday life, without the filter of sentimentality or aestheticization.
Vita Eva Weisseisen's installation Dear Diary (2023-2025), assembled on recycled metal plates, is formed from a multitude of objects: spontaneous drawings, stickers, photographs and her own writings, combining personal references and mass culture contexts. In this way, the objects are created as a kind of palimpsest of contemporary times, which the artist sees as modelled on places in public space that are dedicated to posters, whose parts overlap each other, thus forming a different message, both on a visual and on a contextual level. The project also includes a zine that shows her years of work in the field of drawing, which is the medium through which she processes her memories, expresses her standpoints and gives space to her dreams. Dear Diary is a collage of reflections and mental associations on the contexts of everyday life, which leads the artist to develop her own thoughts: it is a platform that allows her to move from the modest multifaceted space of developing her own expression to the development of her own autonomy. This is reflected through reflections which, as she puts it, are a form of rebellion, 'because they allow her to express herself as she wants', but which, otherwise, encompass broader themes about the nature of art and its role in the context of social order, conceiving revolutionary ideas of a better future and creating utopias.
Natural StupidyGPT (2024-2025) project by Kristian Župan and Kalina Naskovski Perne is a humorous response to the spectacular breakthrough of artificial intelligence into everyday life. In contrast to sophisticated AI technology, the authors' art object, which represents the phenomenon of natural non-intelligence, is created from simple, recycled material – a cardboard box, which represents the frame of a computer, into the slot of which visitors insert templates of generated images, which are then produced, i.e. drawn, in a completely analogous way by the artists, which will take place at the opening of the exhibition. The visitor will keep the drawing, whilst the placement will be decorated with scanned images of the resulting drawings. The work is reminiscent of Tomaž Furlan's grotesque devices, created in the Wear series, with which the artist drew attention to the role of technology in shaping behavioural patterns and changing interpersonal relationships. Kristian Župan's and Kalina Naskovski Perne's absurd machine can be seen in the same light of a socially critical voice, which, in an ironic way, draws attention to human activity in the age of increased automation of information delivery and generation of content, which we take in without any real critical reflection, regardless of the fact that it is an important part of the daily routine of the individual, thus turning the individual into a passive recipient of information processed according to a certain algorithm. At the same time, the artists highlight another very important component: the value and power that lies in human work and reflection.
The works on display reflect fragments of the spirit of the time to which we are both attached and trapped. Its positive and negative qualities are revealed by the artists in their own unique approaches, in some moments uplifting it, in others questioning it. Their works subtly but effectively reveal that the big picture is never black and white, but rather an inseparable conglomerate of confusion. The works of art do not contain a direct critique of contemporaneity, but instead an invitation to reflect on where we stand, what our values are, what it is that we do not really need, and where the limits of our reality lie. As such, while subtly weighing the contrasts of our lives, they offer a profound philosophical existential reflection of life itself, and, in so doing, establish themselves as meaningful and relevant works of art.
Sebastian Krawczyk, Ana Grobler
Curated by: Ana Grobler, Sebastian Krawczyk
Expert advice: Lučka Zajc
Translation: Ana Makuc
Proof-reading: Sonja Benčina
Photo: Nada Žgank
Production: KUD Mreža
Coproduction: Acadamy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana
Support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City Council Ljubljana
