Vlasta Delimar

People of Ljubljana Check If You’re Alive

25.11. 2026 – 22. 1. 2027

Photon Gallery in Ljubljana presents Vlasta Delimar: Ljubljančani, preverite, ali ste živi, the fourth episode of a multi-venue project dedicated to one of the key performance artists in Croatia and the region. After Rijeka, Zagreb and Split, the project arrives in Ljubljana. It is conceived as an anti-retrospective: instead of a linear survey of the artist’s oeuvre, it starts from returns, re-readings and the intensity of works that, across decades, continue to act in new social circumstances.

In the encounter with Vlasta Delimar’s work, being alive is not merely a matter of biological existence, but of the capacity to respond to a body that refuses to be silenced, disciplined or symbolically softened. In her work, sexuality pushes at the boundaries of desire, shame, the obscene and public speech; ageing raises the question of a body that remains visible and active; and intimacy turns private experience into public speech.

Ljubljana is not just a new address for the project, but a city in which Vlasta Delimar’s artistic practice has been present for many years. It was here, at her solo exhibition at ŠKUC in 1985, that someone destroyed works arranged in the shape of a cross. At Kapelica Gallery she performed Looking for a Woman (1996) and The Power Is Equalised (1998), and in 2012, at the Mladinsko Theatre, one of the performances from the Erzsébet Báthory cycle. The Ljubljana exhibition brings some of these works back to the city where they were made, alongside early collages such as Fuck Me and Smell This (1981), with which she openly challenged the taboos of female sexuality in the early 1980s.

The exhibition brings together works from the late 1970s to the present: photography, collage, installation, performance documentation and video. In them, the body is exposed but does not surrender to the gaze; it provokes discomfort, disrupts social habits of looking, and exposes the urge to label the work a provocation, to explain it or to moralise about it. Together with Male and Female (1983), a joint performance with Željko Jerman, and the video Marička (2006), the exhibition shows how Delimar turns autobiography, sexuality, humour, vulnerability and loss into artistic material that remains active today.

The project takes place in the year of the artist’s seventieth birthday. Rather than evoking the closing of a career, this anniversary openly invites a re-examination of Vlasta’s discourse in the present moment. Today, Delimar’s practice is read in the context of a society marked by the rise of conservative ideologies, gender politics, misogynist discourse and the policing of bodies. Her works remain relevant precisely because the social patterns they have questioned from the very beginning still persist.

The exhibition opens with a performance by Vlasta Delimar on Wednesday, 25 November, at 7 pm at the gallery. A rich programme of accompanying events will take place throughout the exhibition.

Vlasta Delimar: Ljubljančani, preverite, ali ste živi is not only an exhibition about one artist’s body of work. It is an invitation to check one’s own gaze, discomfort, responsibility and presence.

Curators: Katerina Jovanović and Sabina Oroshi