November 14 — April 04, 2025
Cukrarna, Ljubljana, SI

Letters from the South

Artists Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babič Košir have, through years of collaboration, developed a recognizable artistic expression built through multimedia and in-situ spatial interventions. Their latest project, Letters from the South (2024), represents an example of a visually rich narrative that intertwines their aesthetically related practices into a unified wall installation combining drawing, collage, painting, ready-made and sculpture.
By combining diverse media, the artists treat the entire exhibition space as a blank canvas onto which they gradually layer associations and, through mutual dialogue, assemble fragments of stories that shape a more complex narrative. The dynamic and seemingly effortless collage is weighed down by individual and collective memories, comments, and imprints of the past and present, which the artists share from the perspective of women, creators, freelancers, and migrants. Both have been marked by the experience of emigration and the legacy of former Yugoslavia, a space that in recent decades has undergone a radical socio-political transformation: the decline of the socialist system, the rise of neoliberalism, accompanied by economic and, ultimately, health crises, general uncertainty, and the radical digitalization of life. In the context of constantly changing social conditions, unstable politics, and shifting cultural dynamics, the artists today explore questions of belonging and the sense of home in both foreign and primary environments, addressing issues of origin and identity. The very motif of the work and their understanding of their own roles have been fundamentally shaped by references to women’s struggles and the position of women in the past and present. In doing so, they adopt a distinctly engaged stance, with an awareness of the vulnerability of the position paved by the generations of women before them. The feminine and sensitive aesthetic that characterizes both authors, despite its apparent fragility, thus reveals themes of emancipation and a decisiveness behind the artists' gestures and actions.
The layered nature of the installation, despite the intense intertwining of two related aesthetics, allows the artists to retain a degree of fragmentation and individuality, without merging their practices into an inseparable whole. They allow themselves space for the freedom of close coexistence of two visual expressions, a result of years of exchanging creative processes, mutual understanding, trust, and an intimate deepening into personal archives and family histories shaped by the ever-changing socio-political realities. The moment of sisterhood and solidarity that has developed through their collaboration imbues the work with a candid optimism that inspires them with hope, the search for solutions, and freer visions of the future.
The artistic duo of Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babič Košir—painters, sculptors, and illustrators—is connected by a similar visual language marked by a refined and minimalist aesthetic. The artists approach their work intuitively, and both in their individual and joint creations, delve into their own biographies and personal experiences, which serve as the starting point for their collective research-based creative projects.
Pia Miklič