OPENING: 03/09/2026, 19.00

Curator: Kristjan Sedej

The Draught exhibition series presents Anatomy of a Haunting, an installation by intermedia artist Maja Bojanić. The work builds on the film Yours is the world in which I move uninvited (2025), using the metaphor of ghosts or phantasms to explore the erasure and subsequent absence of people and our attitude toward them.

The installation functions as a forum that gives voice to ghosts and blurred figures so they can share their stories in four narrative acts. Bojanić’s figures “haunt” us because they have fallen victim to violent exclusionary processes in recent (Slovenian) history. Their appearance as shadowy figures and optical illusions brings to mind phantasmagoria, the popular 19^th-century spectacles in which optical devices such as magic lanterns were used to “conjure up ghosts.” Especially in the aftermath of tragic wars, phantasmagoria offered people a way of contacting the spirits of their lost loved ones, creating the illusion of a link between past and present.

Ghosts have performed a similar function of connecting with the past throughout history, up until the 19^th century, when figures of ghosts began to take on the role of symbols of trauma, loss, and unresolved injustices, acquiring new metaphorical readings in the 20^th-century humanities. Following all these permutations, the characteristic image of a ghost today is the figure of a dead person lingering among the living, a special form of being that Jacques Derrida recognizes as a paradox. Entwined in this are past and present, absence and presence, as in an erased person. It is this physical and symbolic transitioning between the extremes that allows a ghost to deconstruct the notion of the present, using haunting to force witnesses into reacting.

As described by Avery F. Gordon, haunting does not create fear of the past, but invites reflection on injustices and opens up the possibility of social transformation. Ghosts prolong a past that seems over and done with, creating an ontological paradox that forces us to find reasons for the haunting. Most often, these are reverberations of social injustices seeping into the present through their lack of redress and demanding a collective response.

Anatomy of a Haunting uses similar techniques to “conjure up” the figures of the unjustly forgotten and erased, of the bureaucrats responsible for their erasure, and the people who took care of the erased. Presented in the entwined stories are the various forms of responsibility and care for the figures whose presence is officially nonexistent – from a relative’s firsthand account about living with a “ghost,” to a nurse’s reminiscences of caring for a “ghost,” to an official’s testimony about the process of erasure.

These personal testimonies are part of a longer history of the erasure of memory. Practices of erasing individuals and social groups range from the ancient damnatio memoriae, i.e., the striking off of state enemies from official records, to modern, sophisticated forms of historical exclusion. They all have in common political violence, impacting archival records and purging individuals from collective reality. Their absence paradoxically testifies to the presence of the violence that erased them, haunting the present.

Bojanić finds ghosts in the archives of recent history, in places where violence and exclusion (Azoulay) are chronicled, and where the stories of the “subalterns” (Gramsci) are written by the winners. Taking as her point of departure the theory of feminist and queer critiques of archives (Saidiya Hartman, Ariella Azoulay, Avery F. Gordon), Bojanić explores the absence of individuals and inserts new, fragmented narratives into the gaps. Instead of reproducing dominant narratives that rationalize historical violence, the work thus presents notes in the margin, whispers, and fleeting traces of figures that both are and are not part of society, having experienced (social) death before death.

Anatomy of a Haunting shines a light on figures in transit between the official and parallel worlds, separated from social systems, and undermines the notion of the archive and the dominant narrative as neutral vehicles of historical truth. The work raises the question of an ethical attitude towards the silenced and the erased, whose ghosts demand reflection on their occurrence. Anatomy of a Haunting creates a space for reflection on the care of and responsibility toward all those whom history has tried to exclude from collective memory – as ghosts only find peace once such an injustice has been rectified.

Maja Bojanić (1997) is an intermedia artist whose practice explores erasure, neglect, and the politics of (in)visibility, focusing on how narratives and images persist, fade, or disappear. She has presented her work internationally through exhibitions, screenings, and performances at venues including RAVNIKAR, Ljubljana (2026); Kustverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2026); Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2026);  Out of the Blue Cinema, Paris (2025); Mumok Cinema, Vienna (2025); bb15, Linz (2025); Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2024); VBKÖ, Vienna (2024); Nova Gorica City Gallery (2024); aqb, Budapest (2022), and P74 Gallery (2022), among others. She holds a BA in Sculpture from ALUO Ljubljana and an MA in TransArts from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2023 and 2024, she was nominated for the OHO Young Visual Artist Award. She is currently a fellow at Scuola Piccola Zattere in Venice.

Further information here.

OPENING: 02/10/2026, 20.00

Curator: Dajana Bilbija

The divergent creative practices of this year’s Zvono Award finalists – Ljiljana Arsić, Isidora Branković, Mustafa Mlinarević, and Emina Veladžić – have shaped a media-heterogeneous, methodologically diverse, and conceptually multilayered exhibition. Although it is not possible to unify their works under the same thematic or formal framework, when placed within a shared exhibition context, they reveal a certain closeness in the position that the artists occupy in the contemporary social moment. The title of the exhibition, The Present as Found, stems from the generational position of the finalists and the socio-political horizon within which they were formed. Their growing up took place within a reality they did not choose, but whose social structures, value patterns, contradictions, and unresolved issues they inherited as the framework of their own experience. Therefore, the title of the exhibition does not attempt to bring these distinct artistic practices under a single interpretive framework, but rather names the position from which the artists reflect on the present in which they have found themselves.

The winner of this year’s Zvono Award, Emina Veladžić, in her artistic practice re-examines the relationship of the individual to the institutional and technological systems that mediate their experience. How do the systems within which we live produce versions of reality that subsequently acquire institutional authority? This question is opened in her work Incubation, originating from the personal experience of the artist, in which an official police report about a harassment case becomes part of the artwork. Through an administrative procedure, the experience of harassment was reduced to the statement that an unidentified man “addressed the complainant by her name.” The authority of the official document enables this produced version of the event to remain its official record, despite the difference between the administrative log and the live experience of the person it concerns. At the same time, the title of the work establishes both a literal and metaphorical meaning of the concept of “incubation” as a process of creating controlled conditions in which, in the words of the artist, a “formalized untruth” contained in the document is incubated. Placed inside a metal drawer heated to a constant temperature, the document becomes the center of a system whose heat turns the reading of the document into an immediate physical experience that physically engages the viewer and produces discomfort as an integral part of the encounter with the work.

The question of the relationship between the individual and broader social circumstances continues in the artistic practice of Isidora Branković, who examines the ways in which political, social, and economic factors participate in forming personal and collective identity. In the video work Kiss me softly, the artist starts from the process of preparing and sending stray dogs from Bosnia and Herzegovina for adoption to Germany, using the fable format as an artistic procedure to raise questions about migration, belonging, and the idealization of a foreign system. The absurd claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina borders Germany points to a symbolic closeness between the two countries, established through decades of migration and the image of Germany as a “promised land.” The process of neutering, as one of the conditions for departure, acquires in such a context a metaphorical meaning of adapting to the demands of a new system, raising the question of the price an individual accepts in pursuit of different life circumstances. The author’s text accompanying the video work also gives this perspective a generational dimension through the sentence, “If only my grandfather had gone to Germany,” with which the artist connects the imagined possibility of a different present to the decisions of previous generations and the circumstances that an individual finds as their own starting point in life.

With the work of Mustafa Mlinarević, the exhibition’s perspective shifts from broader social issues toward a more intimate space of personal heritage, within which the artist views artifacts of the past as active factors in shaping memory and the present. The work Objects of Meaning combines a series of photographs of staged scenes and an installation in the form of a window frame, exploring how inherited objects become carriers and mediators of memory. The objects in the photographs belonged to deceased people from the artist’s immediate surroundings and function as material traces that maintain and evoke their memory. Extracted from their original context and placed into imaginary settings that evoke a recognizable atmosphere of a family home, the objects lose part of their biographical specificity and become open to the projections of other people’s memories. By inviting the viewer to recognize elements of their own home within the presented settings and recall the memory of loved ones who once filled it, Mlinarević translates an individual experience of loss into a broader, potentially shared experience.

Ljiljana Arsić positions herself in a similar space of personal narratives, approaching the past from the perspective of a generation that learns about it through the traces of those who experienced it directly. The inherited past becomes the starting point of an intergenerational dialogue through which the artist, in her video work Dialogue, brings into relation her mother’s experience of wartime Foča and her own experience of growing up after the war in the same city. The sentence, “We listened to some stories about a time that we didn’t see,” which the artist speaks in the narrative part of the video work, defines the position of a generation that did not directly experience the wartime past, but grew up in a post-war reality shaped by its consequences. The dialogue between mother and daughter does not equate their experiences, but rather opens up the possibility of a different relationship toward the inherited past, so that the present found, although shaped by it, does not remain entirely determined by it.

By bringing together different artistic practices within a shared exhibition context, the exhibition The Present as Found indicates that the reality we find cannot be viewed separately from the processes, structures, and legacies that preceded it and continue to act within it. At the same time, the works of the four finalists show that what is found is not necessarily unchangeable, but that the present remains a space toward which it is possible to establish one’s own relationship and participate in its further shaping.

OPENING: 28/08/2026, 18.15

Exhibition tour by the artist at 20.30. The opening is part of the Gallery Night and Aparaaditehas Festival programme.

Curator: Elīna Drāke

A recent recipient of the Köler Prize, Anna Mari Liivrand works across drawing, sculpture and installation. In her latest body of work, Liivrand extends her exploration of ornamental metalwork, botanical motifs and stained-glass mosaics, incorporating subtle urban gestures inspired by graffiti into her intricate compositions.

Each installation in the exhibition unfolds as a distinct chapter within a broader narrative where every fragment follows its own trajectory while contributing to Liivrand’s evolving visual vocabulary of coiling forms, material memory and transformation.

Combining vintage stained glass, industrial remnants and antique ornamentation, the artist carefully pieces together disparate fragments, coaxing them into forms of striking delicacy. The glass elements embrace fragility: their imperfections preserve traces of the past and become vessels of memory, echoing the philosophy of kintsugi. Whether through floral etchings rendered with the precision of botanical illustration or airy traces of spray paint evoking fragments of urban inscriptions, each structure reveals a beauty shaped by its layered history.

The metal structures recall Gothic ornaments and the protective forms of sacred and memorial architecture, appearing at once monumental and delicate, their linear compositions unfolding like drawings in space. They invite the viewer’s eye to move between overlapping forms, where shifting perspectives reveal new relationships between elements that twist, coil, fork and evolve into ever-changing configurations.

As in Liivrand’s earlier works, the human presence is felt only through what has been left behind. Found objects – coins, keys, paper notes and earrings – emerge as intimate relics, carrying the quiet histories of their former owners and the traces of time they have accumulated. Through collecting what has been discarded and patiently assembling it into intricate structures, Liivrand transforms acts of repair into poetic gestures of care.

Reflecting the complexity of our relationships with memory, nature and the past, Liivrand’s works explore imagined spaces where lightness and permanence exist in tension. The forms of the structures preserve traces of nature’s fleeting presence and create a space where memory, architecture and landscape intertwine. Rather than prescribing a single narrative, each sculpture remains open to interpretation, allowing different relationships between materials, forms and histories to emerge.

Text: Elīna Drāke.

Anna Mari Liivrand is an Estonian artist living and working in Tallinn. She holds a Master’s degree from the Contemporary Art Department (2022) and a Bachelor’s degree from the Sculpture and Installation Department (2016) at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In 2025, Liivrand was awarded the Köler Prize (shared with Hanna Samoson) and an art scholarship established by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art and Kaamos Group.
Her recent solo exhibitions include The Woo of Coiling Paths at Kogo Gallery, Tartu (2026) and On the Edge of Fading Voltage at Bærumi Kunsthall, Norway (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Phantom of the Paradise at Vaal Gallery, Tallinn (2026), the Köler Prize award exhibition at EKKM, Tallinn (2026), From Restorer to Conservator at Niguliste Museum, Tallinn (2026), Greater Old Town. 12 Visions at the Estonian Museum of Architecture, Tallinn (2026) and Between Borders, Between Materials at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Tallinn (2025), White Dwarfs and All Those Beautiful Nebulas at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia (2024–25)
Kogo Gallery has presented Liivrand’s work at Riga Contemporary (2025), Esther, New York (2024) and Liste Art Fair Basel (2023). Her works are held in the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia and in private collections across Europe and the USA.

Elīna Drāke is a curator and gallerist based in Riga, Latvia. She holds a master’s degree in art history and curating from the Art Academy of Latvia and has curated and produced more than 30 exhibitions, from ambitious international projects to experimental presentations by emerging artists. She is co-founder of the independent gallery ASNI in Riga, which focuses on the diversity, urgency and experimentation of contemporary Baltic art. Elīna currently serves as artistic director of Riga Art Week and is co-founder of the Gallery Association of Latvia. Her practice encompasses international collaborations with artists, curators, institutions and collectors, as well as the representation of Latvian artists at major art fairs across Europe and the United States. Elīna previously served as executive director of Kim? Contemporary Art Centre from 2019 to 2023.

In fall 2026, Kai Art Center will present for the first time in the Baltic States the large-scale video exhibition Island Beyond the Sea by Korean-born visual artist and filmmaker Jane Jin Kaisen. In her work, the artist focuses on the Korean island of Jeju, exploring themes such as memory, migration, and the narration of history through the interrelationship between the island’s nature and its people.

The exhibition will be open from 17 October 2026 to 21 February 2027 and will include seven interrelated films completed between 2022 and 2024: Burial of this Order (2022), Offering (2023), Halmang (2023), Guardians (2024), Portal (2024), Core (2024), and Wreckage (2024). This marks the first time the complete film cycle will be presented together in Europe, as well as the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the Baltic States.

Jane Jin Kaisen (born 1980 in South Korea, based in Denmark) is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic works through which past and present are brought into relation. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, borders, and translation, she activates the field where lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories.

Kaisen represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg was awarded Exhibition of the Year 2020 by International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Denmark. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Beckett-Prize (2023), the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023), a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). Recently she participated in the 13th Seoul MediaCity Biennale 2025, the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art 2025, the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts 2025, the Hawaii Triennial 2025, Korea Artist Prize 2024, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea and Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen, Tate Modern, 2023.

Kaisen is professor of Media Arts at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She holds a PhD from University of Copenhagen, an MFA from University of California Los Angeles, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

OPENING: 10/09/2026, 19.00

Curator: Sára Märc

Jan Rousek’s exhibition project examines the work of the Czechoslovak traveller, hunter, filmmaker, and trader Bedřich Machulka through a critical decolonial lens. Combining a contemporary artistic intervention with archival materials, the project raises questions about the Czechoslovak relationship to colonial heritage and the ways in which images and ideas of Africa were shaped within the domestic cultural context. Rousek’s work focuses on both cinematic and photographic representations and on the perspective of non-human actors—the animals that became part of Machulka’s hunting expeditions, trophies, and film recordings. The exhibition connects historical reflection with current debates on the decolonisation of cultural memory.

Jan Rousek is a filmmaker. He studied History at the University of South Bohemia and Documentary Filmmaking at FAMU, where he also completed his doctoral dissertation on the ideology of colonialism in Czechoslovak cinema. His long-term research and artistic practice focus on the reflection of history and colonial ideology in the Czech context. He is the author of the films Empty Places / What About You, Mireček? (2022) and How to Film in Africa (2024), which was selected for the main competition of the Marienbad Film Festival 2025 in Mariánské Lázně. His works have been presented both in galleries and in cinemas.

The title of the exhibition project paraphrases Machulka’s book In Africa on the Trails of Game.

In the workshop series “Public Print Movement goes Publik Machen,” participants work with artist and art educator Katharina Marszewski to create their own artist’s books, each corresponding to one of the five exhibitions in the ifa series “Publik Machen.”

Selected motifs are screen-printed onto paper and subsequently combined with questions, thoughts, and personal impressions to form an accordion-fold book. This process creates unique book objects that deepen one’s engagement with the artworks and the artists. Engaging in one’s own creative work opens up new perspectives on the exhibitions and invites further reflection on their content.

The screen printing process itself becomes a starting point for artistic inquiry and shared reflection: How can materiality, reproduction, chance, and sensory experience be explored through the medium of screen printing? How does our perspective on an artwork shift when it is printed, reproduced, and translated into another medium? This workshop series combines artistic practice and art education with a collaborative process of questioning, experimenting, and reflecting. It offers a tangible experience of how art can not only be viewed but also made visible, appropriated, and carried forward through one’s own creative action.

Katharina Marszewski (born 1980 in Warsaw; lives and works in Berlin) is an artist and the founder of Printmodé Editionen. Her practice establishes connections that seek to transcend the works, objects, and processes themselves. To this end, she aligns (sub)cultural aspects of screen printing with situational, action-oriented sessions in order to reveal the cycle of coded visual languages. Her work “Im Hallensischen Spektrum” is currently on view at the ifa Gallery Berlin as part of the exhibition “Rauschen.”

Duration: 3 hours

Language: English/German

*Limited number of participants! – please register via info/@/kmworks/./de

OPENING: 14/08/2026, 19:00

Rupert invites you to the Mutual Empathies final exhibition presenting the work of this year’s resident artists, Saule Suleimenova and Maithu Bùi. 

Developed during a six–week residency at Rupert, the exhibition brings together two artistic practices that, in distinct ways, respond to the aftermath of violence and its lingering presence: through collective memory, inherited narratives, war waste, and ordinary materials. The presentation is curated by JL Murtaugh and curatorial fellow Katažyna Jankovska. As part of the opening evening, visitors are invited to open studios, where they can explore research materials and gain insight into the artists’ residency process.

Suleimenova presents two new large-scale works from her long-running cellophane painting series, created from repurposed plastic bags, along with two new sculptures from the Zheti Ana (Seven Mothers) series. Her research at Rupert has focused on the children of the city, synthesising historical images of forced migration with scenes from contemporary life in Vilnius, as well as the caregivers that attend to all our needs but whom are too-often anonymous. 

Bùi continues their long-term research into unexploded ordnance and how societies respond to conditions of war. Here, they present the Punched Cards series, which draws on historical systems of classification and information storage to explore fragmentation, collective trauma and unwritten histories. These reinterpreted datasets are shown alongside found scrap metal objects, often collected to produce weaponry, which explore the shifting roles of material through use, reuse and transformation.

What remains hidden in plain sight? Discarded plastic and metal objects become points of departure for uncovering overlooked histories marked by absence, violence, and displacement, yet continuing to shape everyday life.

About the Programme
Mutual Empathies is a multi-year programme initiated by the Rupert Centre for Art, Residencies, and Education and the Goethe-Institut Lithuania. Each edition connects two artists from distinct contexts for parallel residencies and public programming. It encourages artistic connections that would not otherwise take place, creating new responses to global society’s countless ecopolitical questions.

The programme is led by JL Murtaugh (curator, Rupert, Vilnius) and Anna Maria Strauß (director, Goethe-Institut Lithuania). The 2026 Mutual Empathies curatorial fellow is Katažyna Jankovska. Artist nominators for this and upcoming editions of Mutual Empathies include Inga Lace (chief curator, Almaty Museum of Arts), Nick Yu (independent curator, Hong Kong), Sofia Dati (curator, WIELS), Mijoo Park (independent curator and head of 2026 Gwangju Biennale Academy ICC), Helen Turner (artistic director, E-WERK Luckenwalde), and Dr. Bettina Korintenberg (director, ifa-Galerie, Berlin and Stuttgart).

Saule Suleimenova (b 1970) is an artist working at the edge of many mediums, incorporating deconstructions of painting, photography, drawing, installation, and public art to create a meaningful social impact. In addition to her visual work, Suleimenova organises educational, ecological, and social events focused on resistance, collective memory, and promoting the empowerment of the historically disadvantaged. After receiving her MFA from the Kazakh National University of Arts, Suleimenova went on to graduate from the Almaty State Academy of Architecture and Civil Engineering in 1996 with a degree in architectural design. Her recent projects include the 2025 Bukhara Biennial, UZ; the 2025 Kyiv Biennial, Warsaw PL; Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju SK; the 2020 Lahore Biennale; Manifesta 11, Zürich CH; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah AE; along with many other international projects.

Maithu Bùi (b 1991) is an artist based in Berlin. Bùi’s practice investigates dispositions and relational proximity through shared history of violence, science, and technology. In their work, incorporating video, installation, mixed media, and writing, Bùi translates negotiations of life into spatial and situated encounters, with a particular interest in how resonance, speech, and agency emerge. They completed their MFA in 2023 at UdK (Berlin DE), following earlier education in Computational Linguistics and Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich DE). Their recent projects include ‘Bells and Cannons at CAC, Vilnius; the 12th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, DE; Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, DE; Kunsthalle Bratislava, SK; aashra Ashkal Alwan, LB; Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, DE; E-WERK Luckenwalde, DE; and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, DE.

The 2026 edition of Mutual Empathies is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Goethe-Institut Lithuania. Rupert’s programmes are supported by Vilnius City Municipality. Rupert’s partner is INVL Family Office.

Curators: JL Murtaugh, Katažyna Jankovska

Production: Augustė Verikaitė​​

Coordination: Gabrielė Golubovičiūtė

Communication: Kornelija Žvinklytė

Technician: Jokūbas Adamonis

Photography:  Laurynas Skeisgiela

Design: Jana Sofie Liebe and Augustinas Milkus

Special thanks to Anna Maria Strauß, Monika Lipsič, Viktorija Šiaulytė.

Curator Anders Härm will lead a curator’s tour of the exhibition Triumph of Galatea: Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The international group exhibition, referring to the myth of Pygmalion in its title, examines the changes and developments in human experience in culture and society in connection with the onslaught of new technologies.

The myth of Pygmalion undoubtedly embodies one of humanity’s greatest archetypal desires: to transform a lifeless object made by human hands into a living being. This myth has been used as a metaphor in many texts on new media art since the 1990s, but only now, when the development of artificial intelligence and biomechanical humanoid robots has reached an advanced phase, can it be dealt with seriously. The topic concerns artists as much as it concerns humanity as a whole, inevitably raises questions about the latest developments in human evolution and explores how our self-perceptions and self-images are changing. In a sense, our relationship with artificial intelligence is like a duet: it is a two-way relationship, and we are reflected in it in both good and bad ways.

With the rapid advancement of technology, artificial intelligence and augmented reality, i.e. GPS trackers, Google Maps, translation bots have become an indispensable part of our everyday lives. Computers and mobile phones have become almost invisible, an essential part of our everyday reality that we only notice if they are not there. Robots now control whether we are human, and humans do not know to what extent they can still control anything.

This event is a part of the finissage of the exhibition Triumph of Galatea: Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Foto: Aron Urb.

OPENING: 28/08/2026, 19:00
Language: opening in Polish; PJM (Polish Sign Language) interpretation: Marta Stępniak; Ukrainian translation: Volodymyr Dyshlevuk.

Flesh is a substance that evokes deeply conflicting feelings in us: from primal appetite to instinctive revulsion and fear. Through this exhibition, Włodzimierz Maciejczyk invites us to confront this reaction.

The title of the exhibition, Soft Tissue Examination Protocol, sounds like a dry medical report. Yet, beneath this deliberate, almost forensic detachment lies the artist’s pulsating, painful empathy for all living beings, for degraded nature, and for its fate in the contemporary world. The motif of flesh forms the central axis of Maciejczyk’s current research and creative inquiries at the Doctoral School of Humanities and the Arts (SDNHiS). Here, it emerges not merely as a visual element, but as a universal language for discussing our own fragility and the hidden cruelty of the world we inhabit.

Włodzimierz Maciejczyk (b. 2001) is a versatile intermedial artist, painter, sculptor, and performance artist. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS), where he is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Doctoral School of Humanities and Arts. He completed his master’s degree with honors, defending his thesis under the supervision of Dr. Anna Barańska, while his supplementary diploma project—realized in the Department of Intermedia under the guidance of Prof. Jan Gryka—also earned distinction. In his artistic practice, Maciejczyk fluidly blurs the boundaries between disciplines, combining painting and sculpture into interdisciplinary installations. His art is deeply socially engaged; he addresses key contemporary issues such as the commercialization of art, ecological crises, the tragic consequences of war, the plight of animals, and discrimination.

The artist has received over a dozen national and international awards and distinctions, including the First Prize at the 2nd VIA CARPATIA Art Biennale (2023) and the “Żurawie – Lublin Cultural Distinction” Award (2024). His artistic work has frequently been supported by prestigious scholarships, such as the Minister of Science Scholarship (2024), the Marshal of the Lublin Voivodeship Scholarship (2023), and the Rector’s Scholarship for top students (2021–2024). He has exhibited his work in dozens of group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Slovakia.

The exhibition open until: 20 September 2026 (Tue–Sun, 12:00 – 19:00).
Free admission.

raum AU and the Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts (KGLU) invite you to the opening of the exhibition Persistent Remains of Europe by architect and photographer Peter Rauch, which will take place on Friday, July 31, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the raum AU Gallery (Partizanska pot 12, Slovenj Gradec). The exhibition is curated by Jernej Kožar (KGLU).

The exhibition is being developed as part of the “Journey through Arte Utile” project, carried out by the non-governmental organization of public interest raum AU and KGLU. Through research residencies in the Pino Poggi studio, the project enables contemporary artists to engage in a direct dialogue with his body of work and the principles of the “Arte Utile” manifesto, which views art as a socially responsible practice capable of changing the world. The research residency is dedicated to interdisciplinary exploration and new interpretations of Poggi’s extensive and complex body of work.

Participants in the research residency to date have included Tadej Pogačar, Tobias Putrih, Vesna Bukovec, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Polonca Lovšin, Tomaž Furlan, Heinz Schütz, Aphra Tesla, and Marjetica Potrč, with Peter Rauch joining the residency series this year.

The exhibition Enduring Remains of Europe is the result of a two-month research process undertaken by Peter Rauch during his residency. Through an exploration of the archive and artistic legacy of Pino Poggi, it raises questions regarding European cultural heritage, collective memory, and the significance of the fragment as a bearer of history.

Peter Rauch on researching the archive of Pino Poggi and the “Arte Utile” manifesto:
“On the floor of the KGLU storage room, I found stones stacked up. Some were roughly hewn, others smooth river stones. Unlike architectural models, the form here is found, not created. Jernej tells me the title: “Important Remains of Europa”. I barely managed to transport them by car from Sicily. They are truly heavy. There are faces in the stones—Pino carved them into fragments of the foundations of our culture. He reportedly gathered them in Greece, Crete, Italy, and Sicily. He once carved tombstones; here, he depicted the myth of Europa. I read about the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, and his ruse. I look for interpretations where someone points out that the myth does not exalt love, but rather rape. In an article about Europa, Tomaž Mastnak concludes that among interpreters of the history of the European idea, he found only one who called this myth ‘repulsive.’ In my garden, I gaze at a pile of construction waste. Amidst the chunks of concrete and brick, I find bones, bullet casings, and some glass. A neighbor, an elderly lady, watches what I am doing from across the fence. She never says a word. She walks away and sits on the bench in front of the house.”

What am I doing? I am repeating Pino’s gesture: creating a whole from fragments, inscribing meaning into found forms. I gather fragments of construction waste—occasionally transforming them into other materials—and position them, insisting that they hold more significance than one might be willing to acknowledge. I reveal what emerges as I go.“

PETER RAUCH je arhitekt, fotograf in predavatelj. Diplomiral je na Fakulteti za arhitekturo Univerze v Ljubljani in magistriral iz fotografije na Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design v Londonu. Predava na Oddelku za fotografijo VIST ter na Akademiji za likovno umetnost in oblikovanje v Ljubljani, kjer trenutno vodi Katedro za fotografijo.
V svoji ustvarjalni praksi secira materijo grajenih objektov in vztraja v razmerju med dokumentom in konstrukcijo. Na teoretskem področju raziskuje vznik mišljenja v konstituciji objekta ter vprašanje preloma v poljih umetnosti, znanosti in politike. Med njegova pomembnejša dela sodijo Objekti (2009–2015), Tretji kraj (2014), Skupnost (2012–2013), Podobe, zgodbe, sekvence (2011) in Traffic Kids (2009). Leta 2020 je s somišljeniki ustanovil produkcijski prostor za fotografijo in sorodne prakse Kela v Ljubljani.