Opening hours:
Monday - Friday:2pm - 6pm
Monday - Friday:2pm - 6pm
16 November 2026 You are kindly invited to a one-day exhibition event "Scraped for Reuse" by Vesna Bukovec, on Monday 16. November from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM at Galerija Alkatraz, AKC Metelkova mesto. The exhibition is curated by Tia Čiček.
In the year-long project Scraped for Reuse, Vesna Bukovec examines her own archive and her relationship to her past works. She proposes the palimpsest as an analogy for this year's work. A palimpsest is a manuscript page from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that something new could be written on it. The word comes from Ancient Greek and means scraped for reuse. Parchment was expensive, so people didn't throw anything away. Yet the old writing could never be erased. It survived beneath the new lines as a trace, which today we read as part of the same page.
The artist has often exhibited her drawings as enlarged digital prints. After each exhibition she takes them down from the wall; in the process they tear, and in transport they get crumpled and damaged, yet she keeps them all the same. The reason, the artist says with a touch of humour, is similar to that of medieval scribes: the material is expensive, and it would be a shame to throw it away. For years, the remnants piled up in her flat, where she also made all her work, on the kitchen table and in the formats that table allowed. Only with her first studio of her own, which she has shared with the artist Ana Čigon since 2025, could she spread this archive out, go through it and begin working with it.
The archive, however, does not return in the form in which it was stored. The artist selects individual drawings from different past projects and combines them in new ways, complemented by a new series of photographs, Street Wisdoms (Ulične modrosti, 2026), a selection of politically engaged graffiti, stickers, and posters from city streets. Drawings made in different years and on different occasions find themselves side by side and enter into a conversation they could not have had when they were made. On panels, they meet inscriptions and condense into direct, socially critical statements. Prints that once hung on the wall as images come to life in the space as objects, carrying every trace of use they have gathered. The new collages, made from torn pieces of old stickers and prints, push this reworking furthest. Here the drawings are no longer arranged in sequences with a clear message, as we know them from her series. The edges are torn, the pieces overlap and reach into one another. A fist that once belonged to one drawing finds itself next to a window from another.
This assembly is not merely a formal decision. Alongside her studio work, Bukovec has been reading about ways of organising society outside capitalist logic: Yugoslav socialist self-management, democratic autonomy in Rojava, the degrowth movement. The works do not illustrate these models, nor do they offer instructions. They do, however, open a question shared by the studio and society alike: how to make something new from what we already have, and how different parts can exist together without one being subordinated to another. The exhibition thus works as a form of organising, as an assembly of fragments.
The project's approach to sustainability is concrete. It connects to a critique of an art system that expects constant new production, even though every exhibition leaves behind material no one needs anymore. For the artist, the decision to make new works from existing material is both personal and political. It means stepping away from the exhausting rhythm of hyperproduction and acknowledging that a work has a material life beyond an exhibition's end. Reuse, mending and adapting were everyday skills for generations before us, born of necessity and ingenuity. The project does not romanticise them; it returns to them as knowledge we may need again. The artist also points to the experience of self-management, part of our region's history, and suggests we read these ideas as inspiration and direction for a better future.
The exhibition format also follows the logic of the palimpsest. The project is presented three times, each time in a different city and in a different form. The exhibition at P – Space for Photography in Maribor is followed by two one-day exhibition events in Alkatraz Gallery in Ljubljana and raum AU Gallery in Slovenj Gradec, conceived as encounters with the artist, with a guided tour and a conversation. Between the stops, the works may change and be reassembled. This is not a finished exhibition travelling from gallery to gallery but a process that adds a new layer with each presentation.
Scraped for Reuse works as an open, living archive: not a place where work ends, but a place where it can begin again. At a time when we often imagine the future as something entirely new, Vesna Bukovec proposes a humbler, yet more demanding path: take what is left and keep working with it, carefully.
Tia Čiček
