ETC.: around every circle another can be drawn
20. 5.–22. 8. 2026
RAVNIKAR, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Artists: Maja Bojanić, Rayna Teneva, Center for Peripheries, Damir Avdagić, Luka Cvetković, Indra Gleizde, Nevena Aleksovski
Photos: Marijo Zupanov
Emerging from the framework of ETC. Magazine’s fifth issue, Full Circle, the exhibition around every circle another can be drawn, brings together artistic positions that engage with migration, displacement, borders, and the unstable construction of collective memory across the regions stretching from the Balkans to the Baltics.
History, identity, and belonging are never fixed, but continuously reshaped through movement, rupture, and return. The title of the exhibition, borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles, reflects on the impossibility of definitive endings. Every border implies another threshold, every displacement another beginning, and every historical formation the possibility of transformation.
History, identity, and belonging are never fixed, but continuously reshaped through movement, rupture, and return. The title of the exhibition, borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles, reflects on the impossibility of definitive endings. Every border implies another threshold, every displacement another beginning, and every historical formation the possibility of transformation.
Rather than presenting a singular narrative about these processes, the exhibition unfolds through a polyphony of perspectives, methodologies, and artistic languages. The exhibited works move between personal testimony and collective history, tracing how large-scale political transformations become embedded within intimate experiences, inherited trauma, labour, language, and the material conditions of everyday life. The official histories are confronted by fragmented memories, personal narratives, overlooked testimonies, archives, and material traces that exist outside institutional frameworks. In this context, acts of remembering become inseparable from acts of resistance.
around every circle another can be drawn does not offer a fixed or closed narrative. It holds space where multiple histories, perspectives, and temporalities intersect without collapsing into a singular conclusion. Like Emerson’s expanding circles, the works gathered here remind us that identity, memory and geography remain in constant motion, continuously unfolding, continuously renegotiated, and always capable of becoming something else.
around every circle another can be drawn does not offer a fixed or closed narrative. It holds space where multiple histories, perspectives, and temporalities intersect without collapsing into a singular conclusion. Like Emerson’s expanding circles, the works gathered here remind us that identity, memory and geography remain in constant motion, continuously unfolding, continuously renegotiated, and always capable of becoming something else.
Nevena Aleksovski
Melancholy of the Abandoned Lands
2022–
In the latter half of the 20th century, migration in the Balkans was shaped by post-war industrialisation, socialist modernisation and the eventual dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Rural areas experienced depopulation under the guise of progress and the creation of a working class aligned with state ideology. Mining towns provided employment and stability, but often at the cost of forced resettlement and the subordination of entire communities to extractive economies. The project by Nevena Aleksovski emerges from this context. It traces the interconnected histories of her family's migration from rural North Macedonia to a Serbian mining town. The artist situates personal narrative within broader industrial and political frameworks, demonstrating that the extraction of land and labour is inseparable from the extraction of memory, belonging and identity. The installation, incorporating archival photographs, drawings, textual fragments, and readymade objects, constructs environments that oscillate between ruin and remembrance. These materials preserve history in the absence of comprehensive records. Family images, found photographs and natural materials serve as repositories of memory, while speculation becomes a means of engaging with absence.
Melancholy of the Abandoned Lands
2022–
In the latter half of the 20th century, migration in the Balkans was shaped by post-war industrialisation, socialist modernisation and the eventual dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Rural areas experienced depopulation under the guise of progress and the creation of a working class aligned with state ideology. Mining towns provided employment and stability, but often at the cost of forced resettlement and the subordination of entire communities to extractive economies. The project by Nevena Aleksovski emerges from this context. It traces the interconnected histories of her family's migration from rural North Macedonia to a Serbian mining town. The artist situates personal narrative within broader industrial and political frameworks, demonstrating that the extraction of land and labour is inseparable from the extraction of memory, belonging and identity. The installation, incorporating archival photographs, drawings, textual fragments, and readymade objects, constructs environments that oscillate between ruin and remembrance. These materials preserve history in the absence of comprehensive records. Family images, found photographs and natural materials serve as repositories of memory, while speculation becomes a means of engaging with absence.
Center for Peripheries
Sosedov vrt (The Neighbour’s Garden)
2025
Before it became a familiar household container, the tin can was a practical solution for preserving and transporting food over long distances. As industrial production expanded, standardisation transformed the can into a symbol of modernity and middle-class aspiration. In the postwar decades, brightly printed labels proliferated and supermarket shelves became sites of perceived abundance. The can has consistently embodied more than sustenance, encapsulating trust, fear, class, empire and desire, all compressed into metal and encased in print. Center for Peripheries employ this charged object as its central narrative device. The project imagines everyday products whose labels reveal neighbourly relations across multiple scales, from fleeting solidarities and micro-conflicts to transnational movements. Rather than offering neutral branding, it uses packaging design to foreground histories of displacement, militarisation, resource extraction and resistance that underlie seemingly ordinary goods. Familiar formats such as nutritional facts, ingredient lists and brand slogans are repurposed to convey political messages and narrate entangled histories. Packaging design thus becomes a form of historiography, turning the act of browsing into an encounter with the infrastructures of power that shape everyday life.
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Sosedov vrt (The Neighbour’s Garden)
2025
Before it became a familiar household container, the tin can was a practical solution for preserving and transporting food over long distances. As industrial production expanded, standardisation transformed the can into a symbol of modernity and middle-class aspiration. In the postwar decades, brightly printed labels proliferated and supermarket shelves became sites of perceived abundance. The can has consistently embodied more than sustenance, encapsulating trust, fear, class, empire and desire, all compressed into metal and encased in print. Center for Peripheries employ this charged object as its central narrative device. The project imagines everyday products whose labels reveal neighbourly relations across multiple scales, from fleeting solidarities and micro-conflicts to transnational movements. Rather than offering neutral branding, it uses packaging design to foreground histories of displacement, militarisation, resource extraction and resistance that underlie seemingly ordinary goods. Familiar formats such as nutritional facts, ingredient lists and brand slogans are repurposed to convey political messages and narrate entangled histories. Packaging design thus becomes a form of historiography, turning the act of browsing into an encounter with the infrastructures of power that shape everyday life.
Luka Cvetković
LAMB (History always begins with you)
2021
In late March 2021, Luka Cvetković walked from Jarinje, an ethnically Serbian village in northern Kosovo, to Kaçanik, a predominantly Albanian region in the south. Over seven days and 150 kilometres, he carried and cared for a lamb, moving through checkpoints, divided towns, competing mythologies, and landscapes marked by war and memory. The journey unfolded slowly, with roadside pauses, hill crossings, stretches of asphalt and passages by KLA insignia, Serbian flags, unfinished houses and fields beginning to turn green. The performance was documented not as heroic endurance, but from the lamb’s perspective, showing terrain, borders and humans as transient elements in its perceptual field. LAMB (History Always Begins With You) displaces the human from the centre of meaning. In a time marked by climate crisis, nationalist resurgence and inherited conflicts, it offers neither moral instruction nor reconciliation. By foregrounding the lamb’s perspective, the work challenges the anthropocentric belief that reality depends on human presence. By decentring the human subject while maintaining responsibility, it proposes that history begins not in myth or territory, but in the decision to refuse their compulsive reenactment.
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LAMB (History always begins with you)
2021
In late March 2021, Luka Cvetković walked from Jarinje, an ethnically Serbian village in northern Kosovo, to Kaçanik, a predominantly Albanian region in the south. Over seven days and 150 kilometres, he carried and cared for a lamb, moving through checkpoints, divided towns, competing mythologies, and landscapes marked by war and memory. The journey unfolded slowly, with roadside pauses, hill crossings, stretches of asphalt and passages by KLA insignia, Serbian flags, unfinished houses and fields beginning to turn green. The performance was documented not as heroic endurance, but from the lamb’s perspective, showing terrain, borders and humans as transient elements in its perceptual field. LAMB (History Always Begins With You) displaces the human from the centre of meaning. In a time marked by climate crisis, nationalist resurgence and inherited conflicts, it offers neither moral instruction nor reconciliation. By foregrounding the lamb’s perspective, the work challenges the anthropocentric belief that reality depends on human presence. By decentring the human subject while maintaining responsibility, it proposes that history begins not in myth or territory, but in the decision to refuse their compulsive reenactment.
Maja Bojanić
Yours is the world in which I move uninvited
2025
On 26 February 1992, Slovenian authorities carried out what is now known as the erasure – an administrative removal of 25,671 individuals, from the Register of Permanent Residents of the Republic of Slovenia. These individuals, who held dual citizenship of Yugoslavia and another Yugoslav republic but had registered permanent residence in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, were stripped of their legal status and basic human rights. Having to navigate life without access to medical care, unable to rent an apartment, work or send their children to school, many were left at the mercy of their relatives. One of the erased people was Maja Bojanić’s great-grandmother, to whom the work is dedicated and whose warm presence the artist portrays in her video installation. The artist used an infrared camera to materialise her daily routine in a suburban apartment. In this way, her absence becomes visible, her existence traceable, felt despite the violence she experienced. While the artist acknowledges that recollection is always situated, she attempts to portray her great-grandmother beyond the trauma. The presence recorded by the thermal camera seems ghostly, and since many of the erased testified to being falsely recorded as deceased, the metaphor is not far from the lived experiences. To haunt is to remain, however, to persist, to resist. To the artist, it is an extension of witnessing. The artwork becomes a counter-archive and a way of remembering a person who died twice.
Yours is the world in which I move uninvited
2025
On 26 February 1992, Slovenian authorities carried out what is now known as the erasure – an administrative removal of 25,671 individuals, from the Register of Permanent Residents of the Republic of Slovenia. These individuals, who held dual citizenship of Yugoslavia and another Yugoslav republic but had registered permanent residence in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, were stripped of their legal status and basic human rights. Having to navigate life without access to medical care, unable to rent an apartment, work or send their children to school, many were left at the mercy of their relatives. One of the erased people was Maja Bojanić’s great-grandmother, to whom the work is dedicated and whose warm presence the artist portrays in her video installation. The artist used an infrared camera to materialise her daily routine in a suburban apartment. In this way, her absence becomes visible, her existence traceable, felt despite the violence she experienced. While the artist acknowledges that recollection is always situated, she attempts to portray her great-grandmother beyond the trauma. The presence recorded by the thermal camera seems ghostly, and since many of the erased testified to being falsely recorded as deceased, the metaphor is not far from the lived experiences. To haunt is to remain, however, to persist, to resist. To the artist, it is an extension of witnessing. The artwork becomes a counter-archive and a way of remembering a person who died twice.
Indra Gleizde
Eternal Calendar
2026
Rogovka, a small village in Latvia’s eastern Latgale region near the European Union’s outer border, occupies a peripheral geographic position and possesses a complex history of resistance, faith, language preservation and self-determination. The Latgalian language and identity have been preserved despite language bans, deportations, occupations and cultural marginalisation. Myužeygays Kalinders (Eternal Calendar) emerges from this context, grounded in a manuscript by local farmer and cultural activist Andryvs Jūrdžs, created in response to the 1865 ban on printing in the Latin script in the Russian Empire. The photographic series engages with this archival material and the broader histories of constraint and survival in Latgale. It is accompanied by an essay that traces the artist’s return to Rogovka and juxtaposes it with her family history and the village’s past. Experiences of deportation, resistance and everyday endurance inform the conceptual framework of the work, yet they represent only one thread within the region’s wider cultural memory. Ultimately, the work asserts that Rogovka is not merely a peripheral site of victimhood but a place of agency. The village’s history includes peasants who successfully challenged landlords in court, underground youth resistance movements, and farmers who hand-copied books to preserve language and beliefs. What may appear marginal becomes generative through the villagers’ assertion of their power.
Eternal Calendar
2026
Rogovka, a small village in Latvia’s eastern Latgale region near the European Union’s outer border, occupies a peripheral geographic position and possesses a complex history of resistance, faith, language preservation and self-determination. The Latgalian language and identity have been preserved despite language bans, deportations, occupations and cultural marginalisation. Myužeygays Kalinders (Eternal Calendar) emerges from this context, grounded in a manuscript by local farmer and cultural activist Andryvs Jūrdžs, created in response to the 1865 ban on printing in the Latin script in the Russian Empire. The photographic series engages with this archival material and the broader histories of constraint and survival in Latgale. It is accompanied by an essay that traces the artist’s return to Rogovka and juxtaposes it with her family history and the village’s past. Experiences of deportation, resistance and everyday endurance inform the conceptual framework of the work, yet they represent only one thread within the region’s wider cultural memory. Ultimately, the work asserts that Rogovka is not merely a peripheral site of victimhood but a place of agency. The village’s history includes peasants who successfully challenged landlords in court, underground youth resistance movements, and farmers who hand-copied books to preserve language and beliefs. What may appear marginal becomes generative through the villagers’ assertion of their power.
Damir Avdagić
Prevodenje (Translation)
2015
In Prevodenje (Translation), a simultaneous translation is being performed for the camera. The performer is being listens to the conversation between his father and himself and translates it from Bosnian to English and Norwegian. The struggle with the translation process becomes apparent in the translator’s body as he searches for words, gesticulates, tries to catch up with the ongoing conversation, corrects himself, etc. The narrative deals with the history of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, his father’s memories, and the circumstances connected to his own name, Damir. The work deals with trans-generational transmission of trauma and remembering and forgetting across generations. What occurs is a repetition of experience and memories through the words and language of a generation of children, at once rooted in and detached from their parents’ trauma. Avdagić points us to the gaps between the words heard in one language and those repeated in another, as well as the expressions and gestures that accompany the transmission. The experiences of different generations of the diaspora, of which Damir Avdagić is a part, inevitably differ. Witnessing and recounting function as a way of healing, but the nuances revealed by both spoken and embodied language show that the process is open-ended and evolving. Historical events do not happen once and remain in records; they continue to unfold in the long-term effects, recollections and interpretations.
Prevodenje (Translation)
2015
In Prevodenje (Translation), a simultaneous translation is being performed for the camera. The performer is being listens to the conversation between his father and himself and translates it from Bosnian to English and Norwegian. The struggle with the translation process becomes apparent in the translator’s body as he searches for words, gesticulates, tries to catch up with the ongoing conversation, corrects himself, etc. The narrative deals with the history of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, his father’s memories, and the circumstances connected to his own name, Damir. The work deals with trans-generational transmission of trauma and remembering and forgetting across generations. What occurs is a repetition of experience and memories through the words and language of a generation of children, at once rooted in and detached from their parents’ trauma. Avdagić points us to the gaps between the words heard in one language and those repeated in another, as well as the expressions and gestures that accompany the transmission. The experiences of different generations of the diaspora, of which Damir Avdagić is a part, inevitably differ. Witnessing and recounting function as a way of healing, but the nuances revealed by both spoken and embodied language show that the process is open-ended and evolving. Historical events do not happen once and remain in records; they continue to unfold in the long-term effects, recollections and interpretations.
Rayna Teneva
Mahlzeit
2023
When Rayna Teneva was sixteen, her mother gave up her low-paid teaching job and moved abroad, taking on work in hospitality to support her children. She had to devote her time and attention to transient hotel guests, whose fleeting presence would leave an unexpected mark. For two decades, she has been collecting the thank-you cards and notes they left behind. These messages have become a growing archive of recognition, a testament to the labour and care she provided far away from home. This archive lies at the heart of Rayna Teneva’s work Mahlzeit. Through her mother’s personal history, a glimpse into an emigrant life, she unfolds stories of migration, distance and the emotional scars carried by those who leave and those who stay. The video installation shows a performative reenactment of a mother and daughter folding napkins together, becoming an act of acceptance. Tracing a loop between departure and return, the project explores the intersection of vulnerability and geopolitics, and the emotional labour of caring for strangers and preserving family ties. It is a cycle repeated across the Balkans and beyond: people leave to provide for their families, care for strangers, and return with hardly more than traces of recognition received from those strangers. By tracing her mother’s journey, the artist considers whether returning to the past could offer the chance not only to repeat it, but also to understand, accept and potentially break the cycle.
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Mahlzeit
2023
When Rayna Teneva was sixteen, her mother gave up her low-paid teaching job and moved abroad, taking on work in hospitality to support her children. She had to devote her time and attention to transient hotel guests, whose fleeting presence would leave an unexpected mark. For two decades, she has been collecting the thank-you cards and notes they left behind. These messages have become a growing archive of recognition, a testament to the labour and care she provided far away from home. This archive lies at the heart of Rayna Teneva’s work Mahlzeit. Through her mother’s personal history, a glimpse into an emigrant life, she unfolds stories of migration, distance and the emotional scars carried by those who leave and those who stay. The video installation shows a performative reenactment of a mother and daughter folding napkins together, becoming an act of acceptance. Tracing a loop between departure and return, the project explores the intersection of vulnerability and geopolitics, and the emotional labour of caring for strangers and preserving family ties. It is a cycle repeated across the Balkans and beyond: people leave to provide for their families, care for strangers, and return with hardly more than traces of recognition received from those strangers. By tracing her mother’s journey, the artist considers whether returning to the past could offer the chance not only to repeat it, but also to understand, accept and potentially break the cycle.
Curated by: ETC. & Vasil Vladimirov
Exhibition design: Manca Košir & Jan Kozinc
Production assistant: Vida Šturm
Technical assistance: Alen Đudarić
Thanks to Škuc Gallery, Projekt Atol, Vžigalica Gallery, and MG+MSUM for lending us technical equipment.
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana.
Exhibition design: Manca Košir & Jan Kozinc
Production assistant: Vida Šturm
Technical assistance: Alen Đudarić
Thanks to Škuc Gallery, Projekt Atol, Vžigalica Gallery, and MG+MSUM for lending us technical equipment.
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana.
Etc. is a annual magazine, dedicated to showcasing current artistic production from the Baltic to the Balkans.
Based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, each issue is dedicated to a relevant topic in art and life. Founded to promote emerging artists, its goal is to initiate a dialogue, inspire collaborations, and challenge set views.