around every circle another can be drawn
28. 8–24. 9. 2026
Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Artists: Krasimira Butseva, Ana Likar, Áron Lődi, Aaron Roth, Niya Tsenkova, Neja Zorzut
Photos: Matic Pandel
Physical spaces can serve as repositories of memories and material traces, accumulating the echoes of everything that has unfolded within and around them. A factory wall holds the residue of collective labour, a cathedral carries centuries of shifting belief and power, and a residential building represents the promises and failures of entire political systems. On the other hand, the intentional negligence of the maintenance of certain structures or their outright destruction points to historical erasure, in the face of which this particular absence becomes itself an agent of history. The exhibition if these walls could talk is situated between the physical remnants that surround and impact us and the speculative stories we project onto their surfaces.
In dialogue with ETC. Magazine’s fifth issue, Full Circle, the exhibition brings together six artistic positions that engage with material histories, (un)official archives and the layered constructions of cultural identity across regions shaped by systemic shifts, industrial transformation and recurring cycles of violence. The works do not treat history as a linear succession of events but understand it as something constantly overwritten, partially erased, always awaiting reinterpretation, and as such capable of exerting a tangible impact on the present. The artists trace how large-scale political transformations become embedded in intimate experiences, inherited trauma, labour, language, the environment, the body and the material conditions of everyday life. In doing so, they ask: How can history be narrated and challenged through the exploration of the inherited material environment, or the lack thereof? And what can be discovered in the gaps that are omitted from official history?
Aaron Roth
The Last Good Drink
2024
The Last Good Drink examines how property development reshapes the city, treating architecture as the place where political and economic cycles materialise. The title points to the mid-1970s, often identified as the rise of neoliberalism, privileging deregulation, privatisation and market logic over collective welfare. Bulgaria’s abrupt transition from socialism to a free-market economy after 1989 compressed this shift into an economic “shock therapy” that rapidly privatised state assets and restructured public life. Rather than a clean break, Roth reveals a continuity: two expansive systems – socialism and capitalism – driven by different promises yet equally capable of overwriting what came before. Roth presents a spatial installation that is also a scenography for a new photographic work commissioned for the current exhibition that documents buildings and architectural elements that represent this new aesthetic shift. The installation reconfigures the gallery space by using raw construction materials typically found on building sites. These materials are transformed into an aesthetic that embodies commodification, representing a form of capitalist realism that alludes to its socialist counterpart. Beyond a purely symbolic gesture, the installation acts out by obscuring the Škuc Gallery’s characteristic floor tiles, evoking an entropic state, erasing cultural heritage and severing connections to a past distinct from the present. It prompts reflection on the destruction of cultural heritage in favour of profit-driven developments, raising the question of the aesthetic and material legacy late-stage capitalism will leave behind.
The Last Good Drink
2024
The Last Good Drink examines how property development reshapes the city, treating architecture as the place where political and economic cycles materialise. The title points to the mid-1970s, often identified as the rise of neoliberalism, privileging deregulation, privatisation and market logic over collective welfare. Bulgaria’s abrupt transition from socialism to a free-market economy after 1989 compressed this shift into an economic “shock therapy” that rapidly privatised state assets and restructured public life. Rather than a clean break, Roth reveals a continuity: two expansive systems – socialism and capitalism – driven by different promises yet equally capable of overwriting what came before. Roth presents a spatial installation that is also a scenography for a new photographic work commissioned for the current exhibition that documents buildings and architectural elements that represent this new aesthetic shift. The installation reconfigures the gallery space by using raw construction materials typically found on building sites. These materials are transformed into an aesthetic that embodies commodification, representing a form of capitalist realism that alludes to its socialist counterpart. Beyond a purely symbolic gesture, the installation acts out by obscuring the Škuc Gallery’s characteristic floor tiles, evoking an entropic state, erasing cultural heritage and severing connections to a past distinct from the present. It prompts reflection on the destruction of cultural heritage in favour of profit-driven developments, raising the question of the aesthetic and material legacy late-stage capitalism will leave behind.
Niya Tsenkova
Altarpiece
2026
Niya Tsenkova’s work considers the church, its rituals, and the status of icons, connecting them to the contemporary art world. Mystification has always been crucial to both religious practices and the art world, but Tsenkova focuses on the laborious process of creating these spaces, contemplating cultural heritage and the purpose of art through the visible traces of human work. This is prompted by the fact that she grew up in a family of fresco painters, painting on scaffoldings while growing up, and still continuing to do so today. The newly commissioned triptych and a sculptural object revisit the visual language of Archetype, an installation made four years earlier. If the old work was a return to the archetypal iconography of orthodox Christian imagery, the new work is a return to this return, further investigating the various ways that this heritage bleeds into the current moment, continuously shaping an artistic practice and art production at large.
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Altarpiece
2026
Niya Tsenkova’s work considers the church, its rituals, and the status of icons, connecting them to the contemporary art world. Mystification has always been crucial to both religious practices and the art world, but Tsenkova focuses on the laborious process of creating these spaces, contemplating cultural heritage and the purpose of art through the visible traces of human work. This is prompted by the fact that she grew up in a family of fresco painters, painting on scaffoldings while growing up, and still continuing to do so today. The newly commissioned triptych and a sculptural object revisit the visual language of Archetype, an installation made four years earlier. If the old work was a return to the archetypal iconography of orthodox Christian imagery, the new work is a return to this return, further investigating the various ways that this heritage bleeds into the current moment, continuously shaping an artistic practice and art production at large.
Áron Lődi
Metallurgia
2022–2026
Over its seventy years of operation, Hungary’s iconic steel plant, Dunai Vasmű, has borne witness to the country’s turbulent history, its factory walls laden with layer upon layer of past systems and ideologies. Amid the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian owners of the factory also reached its peak. When production halted due to the lack of management, resources and clientele, the blast furnace was kept running solely through the workers’ unpaid labour, as shutting it down would have caused permanent damage to the machinery. The paradox of a factory operating continuously without producing anything became the starting point of Áron Lődi’s Metallurgia. By examining the factory’s contradictory temporalities and identities amid its financial and identity crisis, alongside the stories of its workers and the organisation of their labour union, Lődi challenges dominant dystopian narratives in order to reveal the political potential they continue to hold. Through installation, sculpture and writing, he reimagines the tradition of industrial gothic, a genre that emerged alongside the Industrial Revolution, using accessible language to articulate the exploitation and give voice to the first stirrings of anti-capitalist thought. Drawing on theories of Gothic Marxism, which has its roots in Marx’s use of Gothic metaphors, as well as New Materialism, the artist uncovers the unfinished histories and unrealised futures still trapped within the factory’s halls. By interweaving fictional and factual narratives, and combining fabricated and found elements, he creates visual stories with many layers and clues that address individual and collective agency in the face of today’s political and economic realities.
Metallurgia
2022–2026
Over its seventy years of operation, Hungary’s iconic steel plant, Dunai Vasmű, has borne witness to the country’s turbulent history, its factory walls laden with layer upon layer of past systems and ideologies. Amid the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian owners of the factory also reached its peak. When production halted due to the lack of management, resources and clientele, the blast furnace was kept running solely through the workers’ unpaid labour, as shutting it down would have caused permanent damage to the machinery. The paradox of a factory operating continuously without producing anything became the starting point of Áron Lődi’s Metallurgia. By examining the factory’s contradictory temporalities and identities amid its financial and identity crisis, alongside the stories of its workers and the organisation of their labour union, Lődi challenges dominant dystopian narratives in order to reveal the political potential they continue to hold. Through installation, sculpture and writing, he reimagines the tradition of industrial gothic, a genre that emerged alongside the Industrial Revolution, using accessible language to articulate the exploitation and give voice to the first stirrings of anti-capitalist thought. Drawing on theories of Gothic Marxism, which has its roots in Marx’s use of Gothic metaphors, as well as New Materialism, the artist uncovers the unfinished histories and unrealised futures still trapped within the factory’s halls. By interweaving fictional and factual narratives, and combining fabricated and found elements, he creates visual stories with many layers and clues that address individual and collective agency in the face of today’s political and economic realities.
Ana Likar
Myriad Tentacles Will Be Needed (Again and Again)
2022
A significant part of the collection held by the Natural History Museum of Slovenia is stored in Ljubljana’s BTC commercial complex, a former warehouse site that has become a city within a city, filled with numerous shops, a commercial organism with a rhythm of its own. Learning of this anonymous depot, Ana Likar began her multi-layered project Myriad Tentacles Will Be Needed (Again and Again). All three layers of the work, including a hidden collection of fragmented text in library books, a site-specific presentation in the museum’s headquarters and a video piece, question what makes its way into a museum and how it is categorised. The video, filmed partly in the depot and partly in the Museum’s main building, cuts between scenes of taxidermied animals posed in dioramas, convincing visitors of their lifelikeness, and other specimens, wrapped in thick plastic or bubble wrap, kept in cupboards, as if hibernating, waiting for their spotlight. The present-day reality of a museum bursting at the seams meets the efforts to preserve animals that once lived and to determine what is to be learned from their frozen-in-time bodies, thus questioning the boundaries between the preserved and the preserving, the controlled and the controlling.
Myriad Tentacles Will Be Needed (Again and Again)
2022
A significant part of the collection held by the Natural History Museum of Slovenia is stored in Ljubljana’s BTC commercial complex, a former warehouse site that has become a city within a city, filled with numerous shops, a commercial organism with a rhythm of its own. Learning of this anonymous depot, Ana Likar began her multi-layered project Myriad Tentacles Will Be Needed (Again and Again). All three layers of the work, including a hidden collection of fragmented text in library books, a site-specific presentation in the museum’s headquarters and a video piece, question what makes its way into a museum and how it is categorised. The video, filmed partly in the depot and partly in the Museum’s main building, cuts between scenes of taxidermied animals posed in dioramas, convincing visitors of their lifelikeness, and other specimens, wrapped in thick plastic or bubble wrap, kept in cupboards, as if hibernating, waiting for their spotlight. The present-day reality of a museum bursting at the seams meets the efforts to preserve animals that once lived and to determine what is to be learned from their frozen-in-time bodies, thus questioning the boundaries between the preserved and the preserving, the controlled and the controlling.
Krasimira Butseva
Fragmentation as a Method
2020–2026
In 1989, Bulgaria’s communist regime dissolved into a negotiated transition that preserved the old nomenklatura while offering only simulacra of change. The archives of the Bulgarian State Security were purged or sealed, the perpetrators retired comfortably into democracy, while the survivors received neither reconciliation nor compensation. No national museum was established, and no memorials were erected. Violence inflicted on bodies became a violence on memory itself, perpetuating a cycle of silence, allowing the oppression’s architecture to persist, merely repainted in neoliberal colours. The result is a history that has neither been contested nor mourned, but administratively erased, leaving behind only fragments. Krasimira Butseva’s practice emerges from this vacuum, engaging with communism’s legacy by unearthing how political violence operated and the ways in which it is transmitted across generations. Presenting fragments from two separate large-scale installations, the presentation echoes her non-linear methodology, deploying fragmentation to disseminate information excluded from official accounts. By recontextualising existing materials and her own artistic practice, she highlights the fragility of the archive and how material erasure is a violent act on memory itself.
Fragmentation as a Method
2020–2026
In 1989, Bulgaria’s communist regime dissolved into a negotiated transition that preserved the old nomenklatura while offering only simulacra of change. The archives of the Bulgarian State Security were purged or sealed, the perpetrators retired comfortably into democracy, while the survivors received neither reconciliation nor compensation. No national museum was established, and no memorials were erected. Violence inflicted on bodies became a violence on memory itself, perpetuating a cycle of silence, allowing the oppression’s architecture to persist, merely repainted in neoliberal colours. The result is a history that has neither been contested nor mourned, but administratively erased, leaving behind only fragments. Krasimira Butseva’s practice emerges from this vacuum, engaging with communism’s legacy by unearthing how political violence operated and the ways in which it is transmitted across generations. Presenting fragments from two separate large-scale installations, the presentation echoes her non-linear methodology, deploying fragmentation to disseminate information excluded from official accounts. By recontextualising existing materials and her own artistic practice, she highlights the fragility of the archive and how material erasure is a violent act on memory itself.
Neja Zorzut
Backlash
2024
Neja Zorzut’s Backlash stems from an understanding of the body as a porous entity rather than a closed system, and as such, in constant exchange with its environment. The work takes a closer look at the relationship between the body in motion and the landscape on the one hand, and the breathing body and the air, on the other. The floor installation comprises a contained fine soft substance and metal elements reminiscent of caltrops – weapons used to restrict movement on the ground. Used already by the ancient Romans, they have been continuously used in war ever since. The installation considers how a landscape can become a field of latent violence, revealing the tension between the apparent tenderness of the landscape and the threat posed by its weaponisation. The piece does not merely explore the historical means of militarising terrain but also the ways in which violence imprints on the material conditions of existence. Understanding the body’s porosity enables a different conception of coexistence and the effect of warfare and the weaponisation of the environment, which is in no way a recent issue. Although technological advancements and current global conflicts have made it more acute, a historical perspective shows cycles of violence embedded in the environment that affect generations.
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Backlash
2024
Neja Zorzut’s Backlash stems from an understanding of the body as a porous entity rather than a closed system, and as such, in constant exchange with its environment. The work takes a closer look at the relationship between the body in motion and the landscape on the one hand, and the breathing body and the air, on the other. The floor installation comprises a contained fine soft substance and metal elements reminiscent of caltrops – weapons used to restrict movement on the ground. Used already by the ancient Romans, they have been continuously used in war ever since. The installation considers how a landscape can become a field of latent violence, revealing the tension between the apparent tenderness of the landscape and the threat posed by its weaponisation. The piece does not merely explore the historical means of militarising terrain but also the ways in which violence imprints on the material conditions of existence. Understanding the body’s porosity enables a different conception of coexistence and the effect of warfare and the weaponisation of the environment, which is in no way a recent issue. Although technological advancements and current global conflicts have made it more acute, a historical perspective shows cycles of violence embedded in the environment that affect generations.
Curated by: ETC. & Vasil Vladimirov
Exhibition design: Manca Košir & Jan Kozinc
Coproduced with Škuc Gallery.
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
Coproduced with Škuc Gallery.
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana.
ETC. is an annual magazine dedicated to showcasing current artistic production from the Balkans to the Baltics.
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.