LJUBLJANA.- This summer, Cukrarna Gallery presents three exhibitions: a new installation by Yein Lee, a solo exhibition by Phil Collins, and the exhibition untranquil now – a constellation of narratives and resonances organised in collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Yein Lee: Accomplice
Until August 30, 2026
The exhibition Accomplice at Gallery Parter presents a series of sculptures and a large-scale floor installation by Vienna-based South Korean artist Yein Lee. The exhibition, curated by Ema Ograjenšek, explores material instability, spatial uncertainty, and the transience of forms under conditions of environmental and societal stress.
Set against an accelerating ecological crisis, ongoing geopolitical volatility, and informed by the artist’s own experience of migration, the exhibition traces identity as a process of multiplicity and transformation, oscillating between violent disruption and stabilising alliance. Lee works with polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, and found steel to create assemblages that function as “trace bodies”: gypsum casts taken from materials and surfaces in precarious states, carrying their instability and transience as imprint. Her work occupies a space between spectral vigour and material fatigue, forming tense atmospheric landscapes of crude materiality and poetic emergence. As visitors move through the installation, shifting perspectives continually recompose the relationships between the works, drawing them into a landscape of fragile balances and material negotiation. In this way, the sculptures appear to expand beyond their physical boundaries, reflecting both the material processes from which they emerged and the broader conditions that shape the environments they inhabit.
Phil Collins: Nothing Is Inevitable Until It Happens
Until August 30, 2026
Phil Collins’s exhibition brings together Tomorrow Is Always Too Long (2014), Ceremony (2018), and Mixtape #1 (2024), three major films spanning a practice that moves fluently between moving image, music, performance, and political commentary. Emerging from deeply engaged collaborations with communities and individuals, Collins’s projects examine how ideology, popular culture, labour, desire, and collective memory shape lived realities. Balancing intimacy with social critique, they consistently challenge the conventions of documentary representation while remaining emotionally charged, formally adventurous, and attentive to the poetics of everyday life.
The programme at Cukrarna Gallery, curated by Alenka Gregorič, unfolds over a three-week cycle, with a different film shown each week. It was accompanied by a special screening of Bring Down the Walls (2020), Collins’s documentary exploring the US prison system through the lens of house music and nightlife, at the Slovenian Cinematheque.
Drawing on an eclectic range of forms – from the road movie and documentary musical to experimental television, socialist mass events, and the associative logic of the mixtape – the exhibition offers a rich insight into Collins’s distinctive artistic language and his sustained interest in the intersections between politics, media culture, and collective experience.
untranquil now – a constellation of narratives and resonances
Until January 3, 2027
Artists: Francis Alÿs, Rosa Barba, Éric Baudelaire, Manon de Boer & Latifa Laâbissi, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Tacita Dean, Peter Friedl, Coco Fusco, Coco Fusco & Paula Heredia, Dora García, GENERAL IDEA, Hsu Chia-Wei, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, RAQS Media Collective, Anri Sala, Nida Sinnokrot, Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, Paola Yacoub
With untranquil now, attention is focused on artworks, artefacts, performances, figures, and events that authorise complexity, in which bodies and modes of perception become the agents of contradictory states and troubled histories.
Proposing a web of historical resonances or coincidences, a multiplicity of situated contexts and spatio-sensorial experiences influenced by political and social circumstances, the exhibition, curated by Corinne Diserens, establishes relations to memory and intimacy, and explores forms of displacement of the stage to become modernist building, social housing, public place, abandoned site, archaeological excavation, industrial platform. It brings to the surface sediments to propagate their effects. In various regimes of intensity, it evokes what Edward Said terms “contrapuntal consciousness” and how art does justice to the event, in attempting to restore its intensive potential. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
