You are kindly invited to the viewing of the exhibition Whose Body is My Body? on Wednesday, 28 January, at 6 pm, followed by the opening at 7 pm with a performative program!
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Mentors:
Asst. Prof. Emina Djukić, mentor on the Photography V course, Department of Visual Communication Design, UL/ALUO
Asst. Prof. Mag. Maja Smrekar, mentor on the Sculpture V course, Department of Sculpture, UL/ALUO
Curatorial Coordinator:
Vera Zalutskaya
Participating students:
Sara Ana Bogataj Dolinšek, Martin Dimitrov Spasovski, Tadej Dolinar, Hedda Johanna Charlotte Dönnges, Lara Frelih, Nina Kuharič, Rok Mlinar, Maj Perko, Katja Poštrak, Luisa Prokopová, Leo Samsa, Neža Turšič Šibenik, Jason Tilen Unterlehner, Ženja Vodnik, Johanka Vohnoutová
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For decades, art and the humanities have been at the centre of an interdisciplinary turn that reflects fundamental social, epistemological and technological shifts in contemporaneity. As a result, there is an increasingly evident need for structural transformation at the pedagogical level: academic, especially discursive approaches, should be directed towards the development of critical thinking, and interdisciplinarity should be introduced into artistic research. One of the central nodes of this turn is precisely the body – as a symbolic field and epistemological problem within which scientific, political, technological, ecological and artistic discourses intersect. For at least a century, contemporary art has no longer understood the body as a stable object of representation, but as a process inscribed in complex networks of power, meaning and context.
Contemporary art is therefore in itself a space for interdisciplinary dialogue that motivates artists to establish authentic creative processes, thereby opening up opportunities for collaboration, joint research and multidisciplinary exchange of knowledge and skills, which go beyond the discipline-structured curriculum of the Academy. Based on the assumption that understanding and mastering contemporary artistic practices necessarily requires the intersection of disciplines, we conceived the project Whose Body Is My Body? as a pedagogical-research collaboration between the study programmes of Sculpture (Department of Sculpture) and Photography (Department of Visual Communication Design).
While studio work in the first two years of study focuses on developing fundamental technical, perceptual and formal skills (in Photography primarily on understanding the relationship between content and form, and in Sculpture on mastering the shaping of the human figure and its spatial articulation), the third year represents a key turning point, as the knowledge acquired opens itself to critical reflection and interdisciplinary expansion. This shift enables an understanding of the human figure that moves away from an object of representation towards the body as a subject of experience, action and meaning. In practice, this is realised, for instance, through the transformation of spatial installation into performative form (and vice versa); through an understanding of space as a contextual environment that always coexists in a continuum with time; and through addressing the field of art as an open system of relations. From this starting point, the semester theme, presented in the exhibition through six authorial works by fifteen third-year undergraduate students of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, created during the winter semester of the 2025/26 academic year, was formulated as a question: Whose Body Is My Body?
The latter invites reflection on our (co)existence, which goes beyond the individual level and expands into the field of social, political and ethical tensions of the contemporary world. It addresses not only the biological ownership of the body, but also establishes the body as a space of social control and regulation; as a field for the projection of norms, desires and fears; as a zone where (bio)technologies and capital intertwine; as a collective entity and, simultaneously, an archive of memory, trauma and, last but not least, confrontation with the unknown. In this context, the body appears as a processual field in which relations are continually established, transformed and disintegrated. The question of “whose”, therefore, does not presuppose a single answer but reveals a complex network of relationships in which the body is always already positioned.
The students addressed questions of body politics through reflection on individual, social and political struggles for emancipation from control over biological, social and cultural experiences, which manifest themselves, among other ways, as the institutional power of the state and legislation; as the disciplinary power of economic production; as the discretionary power of consumption; as the cognitive-technological power of contemporary digital and biomedical systems; and also as the subjective power that is established through negotiation in interpersonal relationships. It is precisely in this intertwining that the expanded, body-focused artistic research undertaken during the semester proved to be productive and relevant.
Working in groups where the participants were only just getting to know each other encouraged them to share the starting points of their previous artistic research, which served as a foundation for joint critical reflection and further development of their own individual authorial positions. Based on their expressed interests, affinities and working methods, we suggested that they work in twos and threes. They developed and reflected on their projects during weekly individual mentoring sessions and group Open Studio formats, with the process occasionally accompanied by expert feedback from Asst. Prof. Mateja Pezdirc. Vera Zalutskaya gave a lecture on artistic and theoretical references, while also acting as the project curatorial coordinator and dialogue partner to the groups during the transfer and installation of works from the ALUO studios to Škuc Gallery.
In this process, interdisciplinarity was established as a meeting between different epistemological approaches, working rhythms, technical skills and modes of thinking; that is, through the intersection of professional fields, which is crucial for critical practice within the field of contemporary art and design that invariably requires a reflective positioning in a broader social context.
Such radical shifts in working methods encourage the development of complex creative, communicative and reflective competences, especially at those stages of study when students are already sufficiently equipped both technically and conceptually. Through a multitude of perspectives, they reinforce the understanding of art as a critical tool for addressing the problems of the contemporary world and the relationships that structure it. The entire experience of the creative-pedagogical process during the semester – including the realisation of the exhibition – confirms the necessity of a structural transformation of academic teaching by incorporating practical interdisciplinarity into study programmes.
Whose body is my body? (question answered by students)
The question presupposes ownership not belonging to the body. Attributing the body to someone else is absurd because the body is not something you have, but something you are. It is not an object or a concept, but a presence that exists, feels and acts. It is a concrete experience in time and space.
I interpret the question more as a question of the narrative of my body, which depends on its interpretation, position in time and the discourse in which it appears. But I do think that as long as I experience the world through a particular body, that body will be mine, regardless of how much theory it drags along with it.
My body is only a temporary form. It does not belong to me. It is my energy expressed through matter.
Worn, marked, shaped, intertwined and then released. The body goes beyond what I call my own, stretching into silence and escaping the reach of words.
Sun
Earth
Government
A thousand galloping horses
Prophecy
Bed
Crack
Turning point
Moistness
Someone who plays me
Please provide a simple answer to this complex question.
Bodycorporealityorganicembodimentinquestioninterweavingnewunknownmyyourbody
When I was in kindergarten, my body belonged to my parents, and then I began to bleed. In high school, it belonged to the people who liked me. Soon after, I realised that my body belonged to the system it had fallen into. Now I try my best to remember that it has always belonged to me, and to recognise that its ownership is my responsibility.
My body is mine. Even in a fake world, power tries to control living bodies through images. I reject that and reclaim my physical autonomy.
Not owned.
Not borrowed.
Only happening.
I am mine.
The body is the puppet, and the mind is the programme. Whose is mine? It depends on the pond you swim in.
The body is owned or controlled by the space in which I find myself, but in the crudest sense, it is mine because I cannot evade it.
My body is mine and also everyone else’s, since it exists in the space and time that I share with all other bodies. My body is one with the world.
To ask “Whose body is my body?” is to recognise that autonomy is fragile and that ownership is not guaranteed. It is to see the conflict between being a self and being a pawn, between the desire to thrive and the conditions that prevent thriving.
My body is a space where I and others meet. Only through consciousness, through touch, through the decision to belong to it, does it become mine.
The answer is uncertain. Maybe the body is mine only when I refuse to be shaped. Maybe it becomes mine only through resistance. Maybe the question is the only true form of possession.
Whose Body Is My Body?
Vera Zalutskaya
The human body has been one of the central motifs in art since prehistory, yet the ways embodiment is understood – and which bodies are deemed represent-able – have changed dramatically over time. In Palaeolithic cave contexts (c. 40,000–10,000 BCE), the human figure often appears schematically and the body is frequently registered as a trace rather than a likeness: hand stencils, marks and gestures that function as evidence of presence. Over the millennia that follow – through the classical canon, Christian iconography and the emer-gence of the modern museum – the body becomes one of the key instruments through which Western art articulates ideals, social roles and systems of value. The history of representation is therefore also a history of selection: of what is made visible, what is framed as normative and what is relegated to the margins.
Within art history, one of the most persistent asymmetries concerns the depic-tion of male and female bodies. The male body is more often associated with agency, individuality and public roles, whereas the female body has been re-peatedly staged as an object of the gaze – idealised, eroticised and positioned within conventions that regulate how it may appear. This imbalance is not mere-ly iconographic; it is institutional, tied to authorship, access and the formation of collections and canons. Any contemporary reflection on embodiment inherits this uneven ground: the body arrives already coded, already arranged by histo-ries of looking.
In the twentieth century, the body became a particularly charged site of artistic inquiry as the political ruptures and technological transformations of moderni-ty reframed questions of agency, violence and subjectivity. Across avant-garde and postwar practices – especially in performance, action-based art and lat-er critical approaches – the body increasingly shifted from an object of repre-sentation to a medium: exposed to discipline and coercion, shaped by labour and social control and mobilised as a site of testimony. At the same time, late twentieth-century art expanded the field of visibility, foregrounding embodied experience as it intersects with race, class, gender, disability, illness and ageing – conditions through which power distributes vulnerability and privilege. Rather than stabilising the body as a coherent image, many practices emphasised its contingency: its permeability to external forces, its capacity for resistance and its irreducibility to a single narrative.
These historical shifts form the wider horizon for the exhibition, whose starting point is the question Whose Body Is My Body? All works presented here were developed collaboratively over the course of a semester and the group format functions not only as a production context but also as a conceptual lens: author-ship is negotiated, decisions are shared and meaning emerges through process-es of exchange. The diversity of artistic approaches – ranging from direct en-gagement with one’s own corporeality to reflections on mediated selfhood and experiments with spatial encounter – also echoes the changing understanding of embodiment throughout history. If the body has never been a stable category in art, it remains unstable here: tool and image, subject and surface, private ex-perience and social interface.
Some projects treat the body as an immediate instrument, testing the limits of agency and self-possession in a world shaped by acceleration and estrange-ment; others focus on how self-perception shifts across life stages, tracing iden-tity as something revised through time, experience and vulnerability. A further line of inquiry addresses contemporary regimes of attention: bodies shaped by interfaces, fragmented by information overload and haunted by the awareness of being continuously observed – by platforms, cameras and data-driven sys-tems that translate presence into measurable signals. In these works, technol-ogy is not a neutral tool but an environment that reorganises intimacy and ex-posure, recalibrating how the body appears to itself and to others. One project turns the gaze onto the conditions of artmaking itself: through an exchange be-tween photography and sculpture students, it stages learning across mediums and foregrounds how bodies, tools and viewers co-produce meaning in the stu-dio and in the gallery space.
Notably, in this selection, questions of gender and sexuality, which often dom-inate body-related discourse, do not appear as the significant axis of the show. This absence should not be read as a resolution, but as a shift in emphasis: from identity as the primary site of contestation toward the conditions that increas-ingly govern contemporary human life – precarity, accelerated rhythms and the tension between self-presentation and data protection. What returns insistent-ly is the question of agency and control: over one’s image, one’s privacy, one’s attention and one’s capacity to remain present to oneself. In this sense, Whose Body Is My Body? is posed not only as a question of ownership, but of permeabil-ity – of how bodies are shaped by systems, technologies and relations, and how they might be reactivated through attentiveness, collective processes of making and the fragile, ongoing labour of being with others.
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External professional collaborators: Andreja Rauch, Nika Erjavec
Acknowledgements: asst. prof. Tejka Pezdirc, Matjaž Požar, Urša Marolt, Tilen Mihelič Kurent, Sebastijan Krajnc, Mateja Vidrajz, Žiga Gorišek, assoc. prof. Peter Rauch, assoc. prof. Peter Koštrun, Mark Valenitn Vovk, Lighting Guerrilla Laboratory, Zavod Aksioma.
English proofreading: Arven Šakti Kralj
Slovene proofreading: Inge Pangos
Design: Lea Jelenko
Cover photography: temporary photo-sculpture collective ULALUO
Photos from the opening: Nina Pernat
Exhibition view: Matic Pandel
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The project was created in collaboration between the University of Ljubljana / Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, and Škuc Gallery.
Special Thanks:
The Škuc Gallery programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
