Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babič Košir are visual artists, each with her own art practice, who occasionally also appear as a duo. In this constellation, their work focuses on various social issues, which they approach in innovative ways by combining different mediums, such as printmaking, painting and sculpture, as well as archival and found materials.

In the exhibition at hand, entitled The Olympics, they present a project that they began developing during a joint artist residency in Olomouc, Czech Republic. While exploring the city, they came across a catalogue from the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. The catalogue cover, depicting a girl with a bear, the official mascot of the Games, sparked a series of associations and became the main point of departure for the exhibition.

In their art practices, both artists engage with archives, history and the ways in which past events, images and narratives are preserved, transmitted and reinterpreted. They are interested in the different layers of the past – both personal and collective – and in moments when archival material reveals broader social, political and ideological contexts. In this regard, the found catalogue is not merely a document of a past event for them, but above all an object that opens up questions of representation, ideology, collective memory and the way in which grand narratives are inscribed into individual entities. The photograph of the girl with the bear thus becomes an intersection between, on the one hand, large-scale public systems – the state, ideology, capital, the market, institutions, the media and spectacle – and, on the other, the intimate image of an individual caught within this system. The dynamic relationship between the large-scale system and the individual, presented here through sport, extends into other areas of society and is one of the key concerns of the exhibition. The competitive logic of sport, which on a global scale culminates in the Olympics, becomes the logic of work, productivity, appearance, career and everyday life and, above all, a way of evaluating ourselves. In a society that encourages constant productivity, comparison, achievement and surpassing one’s limits, the individual thus becomes a kind of never-ending project: one can always do more, always be better and yet never be enough.

The Olympics introduces a twist into the competitive logic of contemporary society by demonstrating that it is also possible to create in a way that runs counter to it. The project is conceived as a collaborative work by two artists, each bringing her own art practice to it. Their aim, however, is not to merge their practices into a unified visual language, but to engage in a process of encounter, negotiation and connection between different materials, ways of thinking and artistic approaches. Rather than competition, they seek dialogue; rather than a winner, a shared space; rather than a final result, a process. This way of working also took physical form, as the project developed in direct relation to the exhibition space, where the two artists lived and worked together on the installation during the week leading up to the opening. What has emerged does not represent the merging of two practices into a single triumphant whole, but a shared space where their differences meet and remain visible, with the tension between them giving rise to something entirely different that neither artist could have anticipated on her own.

With The Olympics project, however, the artists do not seek to impose a new system on viewers or lecture them on how they should live. They are more interested in the moment when we recognise that certain notions of success, the body, work, belonging and value have long been inscribed within us. Ultimately, the project turns back towards its point of departure with a series of open questions: What if we stop constantly trying to improve ourselves? What if we no longer want to push beyond our limits? What if we try doing something together without having to determine a winner?

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Nevena Aleksovski (1984) received her Bachelor's Degree in Painting from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad and her Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. She works in the fields of contemporary art and art education. Her work is regularly presented in solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, as well as at international art fairs. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
nevenaaleksovski.com

Maja Babič Košir (1978) received both her Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She completed her postgraduate studies in Creative Illustration and Visual Communication Techniques at the EINA University School of Design and Art in Barcelona. Her work is regularly presented in exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, as well as at international fairs. Her works are included in various private and public collections. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
majababickosir.com