Curator
Maša Žekš
We are proud to announce that as part of the spring experimental pop-up exhibition, we are featuring our in-house artist Tina Dobrajc. The installation includes a large-format painting from 2024 and a selected smaller work from the slightly older series Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em (2022). The selection is complemented, as a curatorial supplement, by a work by the young painter Žiga Kelenc.
The inclusion, or rather ‘co-installation’, of these works by the emerging generation is meant as a thematic enhancement, a shift in genre, or a witty subversive gesture. Dobrajc’s recognisable works subtly and delicately (with pronounced shades of pink), yet darkly and unsettlingly (concealed faces, balaclavas, nudity), foretell an ambiguous and uncertain atmosphere (of the present?). They function as allegory, spanning a moral spectrum between the familiar and the foreign, the safe and the threatening, the traditional and the avant-garde. The combination with indefinable three-dimensional black masses (Žiga Kelenc, Mass series, 2025−) leads to a potentiated (slightly more playful or downright exaggerated) interpretation of the works, which places the entire installation in the sphere of folk horror, which progressively turns into a science fiction fable.
The amorphous masses bring to the forefront the element of otherness, something truly alien, unknown, potentially sinister, poisonous creature, even more exploitative, parasitic, to the critical addressing of nationalised mythology and cultural labelling. The exhibition deliberately leads to the ambiguous (elevated?) questions: within which sphere does the true villain reside (if one exists at all), and whether we can recognise (and possibly contextualise) him, even when laid before us (shrouded in tobacco smoke)?
