The exhibition Excavated Monads includes site-specific installations by three young artists who, within the Ljubljana Academy, stem from different media backgrounds: painting, video, photography and graphic design. Despite this, their practice combines a wide variety of creative elements that, in the spirit of adaptation, constant change and evolving conceptual connections, are always linked to the identity of the exhibition space. The individual art projects are conceived circularly, based on the given floor plan, and function on the principle of compartmented pavilions. These enable visitors to pass ecstatically between sublime spaces, each characterised by heightened audio-sensory experiences of diverse materials, lighting effects, subtle fragrances, kinetic surprises, as well as emotional testaments, social reflection and internalised critique. The artists combine their refined authorial poetics and themes relating to anxiety, concepts of remembrance and clusters of personal traumas with rational responses to the general conditions of local art practice, work with demanding materials and pragmatic reflections on self-positioning within the exhibition.

The spatial installation Sun by Tim Topić appears as an abstract prequel to the artist's series Wall, which he has been developing and presenting at various exhibition venues in Ljubljana over the past year. The two-part installation reflects the artist's timeless memory; one that simply exists, is ambient, unburdened, yet specific, memorable and authoritative. It refers to a sweltering summer; the aimless tossing and turning in bed, where the heat is unbearable and an atemporal idleness is permeated by the smell of sweat and stale cigarettes. In the darkened bedroom, the weary and overheated eye perceives only the luminous outline of the perforations in the blinds. The content and structure of memory are inherently intertwined, trapped in a dynamic time loop, creating an ambivalent amalgamation of opposites: comfort-discomfort, ever-forever.

The middle pass-through room announces an environment inspired by extreme ecosystems defined by emptiness and unfavourable living conditions. With the desert as a space of nothingness and self-limitation in mind, Maša Knapič creates a dynamic polygon and addresses a space suitable for unconventional solutions, creative adaptation and revitalisation. She stems from a desire to create a primary sensation that manifests itself as visual noise, a chaotic moment full of fleeting information. The established system exists self-sufficiently, remains isolated and functions as a passageway to stroll through. The work entitled Vignette: Ashtray – Accumulator – Derivation continues the artist's practice of addressing the modularity and constant mutability of art objects.

The viewing concludes with a film by Hannah Koselj Marušič, which addresses the social objectification of the female body, the sexualisation of young girls and the impact of image saturation on an already fragile and deteriorating self-image. This intimate, first-person confession incorporates photographs, video footage and poetry, creating a tension between the artist's sincere inner experience and the imposed images of a commercial and unforgiving society obsessed with conventional beauty, sex and rigid gender identity.

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Maša Knapič (1996) is a visual artist working in the field of installation art and painting. In 2024, she completed her master's degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She is concerned with the relationships between image, space and the viewer, while focusing on systems of control and enclosed enviorments. She is a member of the curatorial collective 2orde, which she leads with Carmen Santesmases, and co-founder of the nomadic exhibition space Das Garage, which she runs with Neža Perovšek. She has held several solo exhibitions, including TARDIS (Portal 2-7-7-7-8), Sharpening…please steady your device (DobraVaga, Ljubljana) and Failed plans for world domination and other predictable events (Galerija Gallery, Ljubljana), together with Neža Perovšek and Anastazija Pirnat. She has also participated in group exhibitions, among others, as part of the project Plaza Protocol (Mala galerija Banke Slovenije, Ljubljana, and Galerija Knifer, Osijek).

Hannah Koselj Marušič (1996) is an interdisciplinary artist, poet and filmmaker. She explores the transformation of difficult life experiences into universal stories about power, growth and vulnerability. She graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts – AVA in Ljubljana and is currently a master's student on the Video, Animation and New Media course of study at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She has exhibited at the DobraVaga, ZDSLU and Cirkulacija 2 galleries, at the Red Dawns festival and at the ULAY Foundation project space in Ljubljana. She is the author of award-winning short films, and her poetry collection VSE JE ENO VSE JE VSEENO (2024) was nominated for the best literary debut at the 40th Slovenian Book Fair.

Tim Topić (2002) works in the fields of photography, graphic design, spatial installation, sound and graphic design. He is concerned with memory, its concept, contextualisation and deconstruction, as well as related spatial perceptions – the constitution of space and spatial positions. He has presented his work in the solo exhibitions Secants (DobraVaga, Ljubljana), Vršenja (Ljubljana Town Hall), Algorithmia (CUK Kino Šiška, Ljubljana), The Wall (Mala galerija Banke Slovenija, Ljubljana) and in several group presentations. He is an active member of the Kolektiv Arhiv group, which published the art publication Sterilni študent in 2024.