32nd International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women
Curated by: Dunja Kukovec
Presented artists: Alma Gačanin, Stella Ivšek, Jelena Sokić
Other participating artists: Tomislav Vrečar (Ring of Fire), Črt Trkman (sound design for Constellations), Merima Ključo in Jelena Milušić (Duo Lume)
Exhibition programme:
2. 10. 2026
19.00: A guided tour of the exhibition in English with curator Dunja Kukovec and artists
20:30: Opening and sound-lyrical intervention Ring of Fire by Jelena Sokić and Tomislav Vrečar
21:00: Duo Lume festival concert
4. 10. 2026
21.00: Performance Autonomous Agent by Alma Gačanin. LOCATION: Tivoli Boxing Club, Celovška 25 (entrance opposite the Zlati Klub Sauna)
7. 10. 2026
15.00: Guided tour with Dunja Kukovec in English
15. 10. 2026
18.00: Guided tour with Dunja Kukovec in Slovenian
23. 10. 2026
18.00: Guided tour with Dunja Kukovec in Slovenian
An eternal return to the beginning of the end. The spirit of Audre Lorde tells me that we must nurture communal rituals that give rise to joy. Such quantum collapses, or fields of materialisation, allow the differences between us to evaporate. When we experience the interconnectedness of life and the meaningfulness of the whole, all hardships become surmountable, scientific concepts easier to understand and a just world order possible. Do you remember the dance floors at raves and the unbearable lightness of being? Interconnectedness, equality and power – this is where the political trump card lies, which Lorde calls feminist joy.
In the 1950s, Ervin Panofsky reflected on art in relation to the space and time in which it was created. He observed that cultural processes are analogous to scientific ones and that certain ideas are more readily expressed within them ahead of their time. They are bound to the human being, in medieval terms to the microcosm; whereas scientific processes are more enigmatic and far-reaching, as they represent the macrocosm. He goes on to argue that human beings are the only animals capable of expressing ideas through signs and structures that do not merely constitute signalling or construction, even though they are realised through them. More than half a century later, Donna Haraway advocates speculative fabulation – a method which, amongst other things, draws on wild, untrue facts and imagination to explore and depict alternative worlds in which different species coexist that reject human exceptionalism. I think of art as dismantling beliefs about what lies outside us while simultaneously laying bare the processes that transform what is within us. We find ourselves at an intersection, at the edge of existence, where art is almost non-existent. On this fine line between bare existence on the one hand, and the eternal, the divine, the just, the exposed, the magical, the meaningful, the political-ethical and the self-reflective on the other – art is there after all – for everyone and anyone. The same is true of the existence of the universe, which hangs by a fine thread of fine-tuning. The same is true of particles of matter and antimatter, which emerge from the vacuum and annihilate one another in the same instant – everything that exists does so only because there is a fraction more matter than antimatter. Everything that is, exists by the narrowest of margins.
For this reason alone, it pays to think too far, to feel more intensely still and to regard one’s most powerful tool – the sensual body – as a weapon. Political systems emerge and collapse, are built and disappear – capitalist-driven techno-feudalism will, like every other system, meet its end. For a new socio-ecological order to emerge, an extensive diagnosis of today’s malignant system is not enough. We do not want to heal the organs; we want to amputate them and create new ones, yet no precise blueprints for the latter exist. Alongside detailed plans based on an analysis of the past and present, we also need a critique of the future. To think far, to feel deeper.
In space-time, entropy increases. Flat systems with their anomalies laid bare are dead systems. Every order remains acceptable as long as anomalies and flaws are not perversely exposed, thereby nullifying the tension. When dynamism gives way to numbness, restarting the system requires a cut, a break, a glitch. Transformative historical precedents are eloquent and categorical. The Republicans were able to replace the royalists because they ritually removed symbols; on 16 October 1793, they also beheaded Marie Antoinette. Communism toppled the old bourgeoisie on the night of 17–18 July 1918, when the blue bloods who had been regarded as immortal for centuries fell with bullets in their foreheads in a damp cellar. These are just two examples that were unimaginable until they actually happened. Oligarchs to the guillotine, psychopaths, disguised in Brioni, Kiton suits … to be deported into isolation without a shred of democracy. Only amid the burnt remains of the old world’s symbols will we be able to map a new human geography, with a new legend and different symbols.
It is time to enter the Power House. Three artists: Jelena Sokić, Alma Gačanin and Stella Ivšek, with their internal, external, subtle and invisible boundaries of thought, feeling and perception, generate tension in this group exhibition by setting up intimate registers as opposed to public ones, through fissures that are more personal than social, and across the categories of the technical and the technological. Sara Ahmed would mark these as sweaty concepts and cognitive turns that are formed not merely through academic research, but primarily through embodied experience, when we confront new, different worlds physically and emotionally. Within the matrix of collective trauma of quantum dimensions, the revolutionary love of the Palestinian feminist Sara Ihmoud also shields us from the numbness and unmanageability of post-traumatic stress disorder. Artists Jelena Sokić, Alma Gačanin and Stella Ivšek present this love in the form of unashamed thinking, as the inalienability of sensual bodies and through the nurturing of fundamental relations.
In their work, art is also the enactment of the impossible, a resolute “no!” to finality and a commitment to an unyielding stance that winds its way through the entire history of art. At the same time, their art speaks of a future that the present declares to be impossible. We are not one, yet we share what is common.
Jelena Sokić, in her spatial composition Ring of Fire, combines oil painting with scenography and a sonic-lyrical intervention, which she performs together with her former husband Tomislav Vrečar. The painting installation (and intervention), set amid blood-rich drapery, speaks of a love that is neither fleeting nor subjective, but rather an all-encompassing force that unites rather than divides; connection is the constant, while separation is a singular event within that same constant. The proto-realist ludism in the remaining large-format paintings depicts a subject that connects with the other(s) through revealed transformations. The attention is always directed towards the unrepeatability of (interpersonal) connections, while each motif of sweaty thoughts also contains a resolution.
Alma Gačanin combines watercolour and performance through a process of reduction (achieving as much as possible with as few strokes as possible, author’s note). She fights for the carnality of the body and the right to erotic self-expression. Despite feminist cautions, Gačanin uses drawing, language and the body, among other things, striving to resist the complete colonisation of sensuality by patriarchal media doctrine. We will not renounce the sexual gaze upon beautiful bodies! Your gaze, your power. My body, my weapon, my pleasure, my sensuality. Her performance Autonomous Agent stages a process that abuses the act of stripping away shame. She discards layers of shame and socially reinforced discomfort like potato peelings and crushes them with boxing gloves. Practising the recognition of emotions, training the transformation of emotions. Victory is always relational; if the first step is personal, the last is always collective.
Stella Ivšek, in her intermedia installation combining the intimate process of casting face masks, video mapping and an original sound composition by Črt Trkman, speaks of friendship that traverses space-time and sustains an intense (meta)physical connection. More than anything, friendship means a relationship founded on the power to conjure up, time and again, the version of ourselves we love most. It shines bright when we find ourselves in darkness. The work Constellation is a tribute to the resilience of relationships and a challenge to identity politics.
Through the visual immediacy of its artworks, the exhibition also speaks to the fact that today we can once again be “just” human beings. We now possess a technology that is not merely an extension of ourselves. We have realised a historical phantasm – a human-like language machine that draws on our knowledge, can act autonomously and simultaneously manages all our extensions. We will find ourselves on a map where every individual invests their time, means and resources, knowledge and warmth in setting the common in motion and co-creating planetary well-being. The machine, even though it may replace human touch in many areas, cannot replace universal empathy. Empathy is the future of humanity, ensuring that all planetary entities are causally and consequentially provided for in terms of food, healthcare, shelter, education and fun. Where necessary, we will trade amongst ourselves in art or surplus produce. Those who traded with lives, money and other existential needs are long gone.
Dunja Kukovec 2026 (cc)
Sources
Ahmed, S. (2023). The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. Seal Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Ihmoud, S. (2024). On Love, the Palestinian Way. Pluto Journals.
Lorde, A. (1978). The Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power in Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press, Berkeley.
Panofsky, E. (1955). Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Varoufakis, J. (2024). Tehnofevdalizem. Kaj je pokončalo kapitalizem. Mladinska knjiga.
and many others, notably this time Karen Barad, Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze…
Biographies:
Jelena Sokić (Zagreb) is a painter and visual artist whose practice explores the boundaries between figuration, abstraction and the materiality of the image. In addition to large-scale canvases, she creates drawings, prints, videos and interdisciplinary works. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and spent part of her studies undertaking further training at the Brera Academy in Milan. Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions. For the painting installation Ring of Fire, she collaborates with Tomislav Vrečar (Nova Gorica), a poet and writer who is also involved in music. He has published several collections of poetry and two novels, and is also active in the field of music as a songwriter, singer and guitarist.
Alma Gačanin (Sarajevo) is a visual artist whose practice combines drawing and watercolour with performance art. She completed her Master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo and is currently completing a second Master’s degree under the auspices of the European Regional Programme in Democracy and Human Rights (ERMA). She is a member of the feminist collective CRVENA and, alongside exhibiting widely, publishes critical texts and essays.
Stella Ivšek (Ljubljana) is an intermedia artist and visual performer (VJ). She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Her artistic practice grows between the analogue and the digital, at the intersection of video, light, space, sound and scenography. She creates interactive installations, audiovisual performances and spatial installations in which projection forms an integral part of the space and its dramaturgy. She works under the artistic name 5237 and is a co-founder of the BEAM TEAM collective.
Duo Lume is a music project by Merima Ključo and Jelena Milušić (Rovinj, Sarajevo) that has been hosted at various festivals and other events around the world since 2018.
Merima Ključo is an internationally acclaimed concert accordionist. Her creative practice is distinguished by exceptional musicianship and an exploratory approach, through which she opens up new possibilities for sonic expression. She collaborates with renowned orchestras and ensembles, and also composes music for theatre, film and radio. Jelena Milušić is a singer of remarkable vocal range and a commanding stage presence, who delivers persuasive interpretations of blues, jazz, traditional Balkan and world music. She has also worked in the field of electronic music as a vocalist and lyricist, and was a member of the legendary feminist music group Starke (together with Andreja Dugandžić). Something new is currently in the pipeline… let’s keep an eye out.
Thanks to Jasmina Založnik and Pia Brezavšček for their trust and support, to Katja Kobolt for the cover photograph, a thorough read-through and vision, to Jelena Petrović for immersing herself in the text, to Danijela Dugandžić for her wit, to Red Mined as a whole for the friendship, subversiveness and solidarity, to Magnus Hoffritz for being an open-minded father of a strong and beautiful girl, to Andreja Dugandžić for her sisterly help, to Trnovo 1912 for the additional power, to Nada Mihajlović for the extra idea, to Jana Prepeluh for being there, to Iskra for the deep dive and to Ilija for the sanity, and to T. for making me believe in miracles.
Cover image: Power House, foto Katja Kobolt, 2026
Translation into English: Arven Šakti Kralj
Slovene proofreading: Inge Pangos
Design of exhibition brochure: Lea Jelenko
Exhibition view: Lucija Rosc
Organisation and production: City of Women, Škuc Gallery
The Škuc Gallery programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
