10. 11. – 3. 12. 2026

Artists: Luana Lojić, Bruna Jakupović, _nominis
Curator: Tea Kantoci

Exhibition opening and program:

10. 11. 2026 

19.00 Exhibition opening

19.30 Ordinary Mortals list – lecture performance and listening 

20.30 Bruna Jakupović: 3XL3XS,  _nominis: crust, glitter, pixel – simultaneous performance

Sometimes something enters the mouth and refuses to remain what it was. It is swallowed, dissolved against the tongue, spat out or left clinging to the soft palate long after the taste has gone. Perhaps it is something precious; perhaps only a grain of something, a small sweet, a mouthful of water, a list, a thought that has arrived at the wrong time. You can feel it in the body. There is a particular intimacy in not knowing exactly what you have taken in, just as there is a certain humour in discovering that something has become part of you before you have had the chance to decide whether you wanted it there. Oh no, I’ve disintegrated. Never mind. Let’s begin again.

Bringing together the works and performances by young Croatian artists Luana Lojić, Bruna Jakupović and _nominis, the exhibition unfolds through a constellation of bodies (mine and yours), images, objects, substances and gestures caught at various stages of becoming something else. Dust, foam, plastic, light, word, water, spit, glitter, skin, sound and accumulation: these use or produce materials that gather, disperse, cling, evaporate, reflect or resist absorption. Nothing quite settles into its assigned place. A surface becomes an opening, an image acquires a body, a body turns into an image, a thought spills into a space. The works do not necessarily speak the same language, but they share a certain porosity, a willingness to let things leak, drop, drop, drop across their boundaries, to become contaminated by what is next to them.

Attention, too, behaves like a substance. It catches on things, sometimes wanders off, follows a seemingly irrelevant detail and returns carrying something from elsewhere. In Luana Lojić’s work popis obične smrtnice (An ordinary mortal’s lexicon), the hundredth thought is allowed to matter as much as the first. Through a kind of nocturnal logic, an idea wanders until it takes on another form: a protein begins to resemble confetti, a sweet opens onto a history of ritual and fertility, an object leads to an image, a word to a sound. In popis obične smrtnice, knowledge moves between fact and fiction. Nothing is quite incidental, though not everything fits. The pleasure lies in following a thought beyond its apparent destination, in discovering that even the most unlikely things might have something to do with one another.

The mouth is a place of passage where speech, pleasure and discomfort meet and burn at the same time. In Bruna Jakupović’s work 3XL3XS, it becomes a site where the body both takes in and turns against what enters it. In the video, she kneels on the front of a car as another person pours water into her mouth. She gags as the liquid enters, swallowing and evoking the ingestion of oil. Elsewhere or right before you, a monumental tooth holds brown whipped cream, while the live performance stages a tension through gasoline and matches, charged with the possibility of xxx. At the same time, she turns towards her own body through gestures of heightened desire and self-disgust, exposing the violence of self-objectification. She spits, slaps, reads. She holds poppy seeds between her teeth. The situation evokes an uneasy mixture of absurdity, intimacy and impending violence. Take a breath.

In nominis’s krmelj, šljokica, piksel (crust, glitter, pixel), the body becomes difficult to locate, its disappearance inseparable from the technologies through which it is made visible. Light catches, fractures and redistributes the figure across the projected image, turning the body into a shifting cluster of pixels, a surface continually produced through looking. Crust, glitter, make-up, skin, the cut of a razor: matter appears neither as a stable foundation beneath the image, nor as something the image can leave behind. _nominis lip-syncs to their own recorded voice, separating its sound from the body that seems to produce it. The voice returns, but not quite to its source. Identity becomes a practice of repetition (let’s repeat!), construction and displacement, something that never arrives at a definitive version of the self. 

Begin again. The exhibition opens with or through an extended sequence of performances by all three artists, playing out over the course of approximately two hours. The performances become a way of laying out what has gathered here. There is something ceremonial in this prolonged act of presentation, though nothing is summoned by it. Perhaps the exhibition is less concerned with holding things together than with noticing what happens when they come apart. Not every substance can be digested and not every encounter produces a recognisable result. Some things remain caught in the throat; some dissolve before they can be named: others return in altered form, as if waiting for another chance. There can be pleasure in trying again, in sticking a finger into something just to see what happens, in discovering that the self is not quite where it was a moment ago. Oh no, you’ve disintegrated.

Artists’ Biographies:

Bruna Jakupović (b. 1998) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb with a degree in Animation and New Media. Her art practice explores the body, identity and feminine rage. Her media interests include soft sculpture, film, text, installation, poetry, performance and sound. Bruna has shown her work in both solo and group exhibitions, including the 35th and 37th Youth Salon at HDLU (2020/2024), BoSA – Briefing on Soft Arts at Tratinska 36 (2021) and Improspections at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022). As a member of the ROSE collective, she has taken part in local residencies and exhibited at Gallery Cekao, GMK and KUĆĆA. In 2024, she participated in the WHW Novaci curatorial residency programme, where she worked with ROSE as a curator on the exhibition PRE/FORMATIONS. In 2026, she presented SHOW ME YOURS I SHOW YOU MINE, a performance staged as part of Pogon Jedinstvo’s residency programme.

Luana Lojić (b. 1991, Pula, Croatia) is an artist who imagines sensory data as semi-permeable, autonomous and chaotic beings. Fascinated by hyperinformational dust and sensitive media, her installations and performances explore object empathy, cosmophilia and the subtle matter of things. She is a member of the Ljubavnice collective and shares her life with her dog Ulla. Her work What is Sound? 2.0_Alpha Blending (2020) received a special mention at the 35th Salon of Young Artists and was performed internationally, including at Ars Electronica (Austria) and Rencontres Monde(s) Multiple(s) (France). It was also cited at the University of Technology Sydney as an example of experimental methodology. Other works include Bits of Real: For Development Purposes Only (27th Slavonski Biennial, 2020) and To Foretell a Being’s Cast (Vital Currencies, Max Planck Institute, 2023). She has taken residencies at Akademie Schloss Solitude, V2_Institute for Unstable Media (the Netherlands), MMSU Kamov (Croatia), Espositivo (Spain), ŠKUC (Slovenia) and WAF (France).

_nominis is a multimedia artist using drag and light to explore identity and virtuality. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, they also completed the WHW Academy 2024 programme. Their practice is concerned with the drag alter ego “nominis” and its materialisation in objects and digital space through video, light installation and drag performance. Poetics of material and personal narratives drive the autofictional worlds, built on vulnerability and sharpness, glass and glitter.

English proofreading: Arven Šakti Kralj
Slovene proofreading: Inge Pangos
Design of exhibition brochure: Lea Jelenko
Photos from the opening: Simão Bess
Exhibition view: Matic Pandel

 Thanks to:  Organisation and production: Objekt plesa

Support:

The Škuc Gallery programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Ljubljana.