Tjaša Kalkan

Glorija Lizde’s I Swallowed My Dream revisits nineteenth-century psychiatric photography, exposing the power relations embedded in medical archives of hysteria. By re-enacting historical images and positioning herself as both photographer and subject, Lizde disrupts the authority of the clinical gaze reclaiming suppressed female histories. If Lizde interrogates the institutional archive, Hana Selena Sokolović turns to the fragile, familial one. In Dear Orchid, she departs from a family diary written during the Bosnian War, the only remaining record of her sisters’ displacement. Returning to the places traced in the diary, Sokolović treats the archive as something embodied and transmitted across generations.

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Nik Erik Neubauer’s White Smoke, Brown Glare observes New York City as a site of aspiration and inequality. Through street photography and diaristic wall texts, the work captures everyday life shaped by gentrification and hyper-capitalism, while foregrounding small communities as spaces of resistance, warmth, and survival.

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Tjaša Kalkan is equally interested in different urban dynamics visible in the orchestrated environment of a construction site. Her focus remains on a single case study - voyeuristic observation of construction of a new residential building in her area. In the work DUET she juxtaposes the construction of a new residential building with the decay of her own modernist high-rise. Through this parallel documentation, the work reflects on impermanence, labor, and time, resisting linear narratives of progress.

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Kalkan's poetic tale of impermanence resembles the conceptual framework of Pavle Nikolić's project Knots. His work observes creation and decay from a more abstract and material register. Knots appear here not as metaphors but as operations - sites where tension, dependency, and collapse are staged in miniature. Refusing ideals of integrity or permanence, the knot exposes its own conditions of undoing. It binds and incubates, accumulating residue, memory, and excess.

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The members of the jury:

Barbara Gregov

Lovro Japundžić

tjLea Vene

Tia Čiček, curator

Natalija Paunić, curator