ANDREJ ŠKUFCA, KATRIN EULLER AND MIRIAM STONEY: INTRUDERS, UNINVITED INTO CHAOS
(or, The Petola Protocols: Notes Toward a Slippery Intelligence)
(or, It’s Unlike Us) |
13.06.2025 – 24.08.2025, Monfort Gallery, Portorož & Loža Gallery, Koper | Curated by Laura Amann Marín.
Press conference: Thursday, 12.6. 2025, Loža Gallery, Koper, at 12pm.
Opening: Friday, 13.6. 2025, Monfort Gallery, Portorož, at 7 pm.
Institutional introduction: Mara Ambrožič Verderber
Coordination: Ana Papež
Logistics and technical installation: Niko Mally, Erik Malnar, Janko Atelsek, Rok Horvat
Special thanks: Neja Zorzut, Martina Vovk, Borut Jerman
Production: Piran Coastal Galleries 2024/25 –
With the support of: MG+MSUM Ljubljana; Zavod Projekt Atol, Ljubljana; Galerija New Jörg, Wien; Ravnikar Gallery, Kucca, Zagreb.
Andrej Škufca, Solaristika I, video, 2025.
Courtesy: the artist.
INTRODUCTION
By Mara Ambrožič Verderber, director of Piran Coastal Galleries
With the project “Intruders, Uninvited Into Chaos," Andrej Škufca continues his practice of thematizing the infrastructural aspects of global techno-ecology, where fiction, technological design, and processes of industrial production of synthetic materials are combined in both symbolic and material senses.
Andrej Škufca's exhibition pertains to the program of nationally relevant exhibitions that, in accordance with our museum's strategy, present contemporary Slovenian artists to the public who utilize innovative tools and advanced methods of creation. Andrej Škufca belongs to the middle generation of Slovenian authors who have been distinctly engaged in changes in the field of Slovenian contemporary art for over a decade.
With Andrej Škufca's exhibition, we aim to engage our Litoral public in understanding new approaches in sculpture and spatial projects from a 21st-century perspective. The artworks in the exhibition will explore the apparent autonomy of increasingly globally intertwined systems and their expansion. With references to post-Eastern and post-real modernity, the project will critically examine the role of humanity in the so-called “East."
In his works, the artist questions social and techno-scientific achievements and their relationship to the “digitalized present." As it turns out, technology is increasingly interfering in our lives and transforming them. Due to this bipolarity of the technological revolution that took place in the 21st century, a generation of young visual artists (for example, those born after 1980, who have not had the opportunity to produce major independent exhibitions on a national scale in the last decade) recognizes it as their own and as a fundamental, yet problematic, characteristic of the time in which they live.
For this purpose, in-media workshops will be organized with the artist and various groups, as well as public presentations for the general public. The exhibition, defined as a large spatial installation of exceptionally large sculptures, will connect the space into a network of attractive objects, where large, free-standing, lying sculptures will create an interconnected system.
For this production by OGP, we have collaborated with related centers for fine arts in the domestic and European space (Zavod Projekt Atol, Ljubljana; MG+MSUM Ljubljana; Galerija New Jörg, Vienna; Ravnikar Gallery, Ljubljana; Kucca, Zagreb), with whom we are striving to have the exhibition “circulate" in the coming period of 2026.
The solo exhibition will be on view at the Monfort Gallery in Portorož and the exhibition space of the Loža Gallery in Koper from June 12 to August 24, 2025. The exhibition is curated by the renowned curator Laura Amann.
Andrej Škufca (1987) is a visual artist and a member of the editorial team of the magazine Šum. His works have been presented, among others, at the National Museum of 21st Century Art MAXXI in Rome; Ludwig Museum in Budapest; Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Oslo; Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova and Moderna galerija in Ljubljana; Maribor Art Gallery; and the 34th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (MGLC).
CRITICAL CONTRIBUTION
By Laura Amann Marín, exhibition curator
“None of the insensate forms I saw that night corresponded to the human figure or any conceivable use…”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things”
What if telepathy isn’t science fiction, but the ground floor of existence — a pre-verbal shimmer that pulses beneath language, logic, and even love? Not the movie version, all mind-reading and militarized ESP, but something stranger: an ambient form of knowing, of tuning into the patterns that precede speech. Children sometimes live there. So do octopuses. Perception on the spectrum, dream logic, fungal networks — all operating on frequencies outside the normative bandwidth.
And what if the ones trying to speak to us aren’t even ‘human’ or care about our reception?
In the sci-fi films Solaris (1972), Stalker (1979), and Annihilation (2018), alien entities don’t invade — they persist. They radiate intelligence not through dialogue but through landscape, rhythm, mutation. They don’t want to destroy us. They don’t want to be us. They might not even notice us. And perhaps that’s the most terrifying thing of all. They destabilize not through violence, but through form. They operate on atmospheres rather than arguments.
Now imagine that this kind of slow, ambient, unfathomable consciousness exists not in deep space, but somewhere slightly less dramatic — say, between Koper and Piran.
And it’s made of slime.
Petola, the living skin of the Sečovlje salt pans, is a microbial mat of cyanobacteria, diatoms, and algae cultivated through centuries of embodied care. It is at once infrastructure, archive, and quiet collaborator. Without it, traditional salt production — artisanal, seasonal, gloriously unproductive by capitalist standards — wouldn’t work. Petola doesn’t speak, but it does remember. It does its thing. It is material memory — essential and alive.
This exhibition begins from the suspicion that we are not alone — not in the extraterrestrial sense, but in the epistemological one. That there are things in our immediate environment — microbial, architectural, mineral — that carry intention or resonance beyond our frames of understanding. That the coast itself might be trying to tell us something. The question is not whether we can understand, but whether we can learn to listen differently.
Like Borges’s furniture from nowhere, or the shimmer in Garland’s Annihilation, Petola resists categorization. It is alive, but not expressive; cultivated, but not owned. It’s a gooey witness to centuries of human labor, salt rituals, and ecological entanglement. It embodies the impossibility of ‘the natural’ existing separately from ‘the cultural’. It resists the extractive gaze. It insists on maintenance as a mode of relation. It is, quite literally, a slippery subject.
Meanwhile, just down the coast, Luka Koper orchestrates its own choreography — of cranes, containers, commodities, and cars. If Sečovlje is slow power, Koper is speed logic: 24/7 logistics in full capitalist bloom. Here, infrastructure doesn’t shimmer — it screams. It is extractive, efficient, scalable. The port and the pans form a coastal dialectic: two visions of the future, two temporalities, two kinds of intelligence.
The two-part exhibition Intruders, Uninvited Into Chaos stages this tension within an architectural, typological and socio-political encounter between a large-scale former salt warehouse on the coastline of Portorož and a Venetian Gothic palace on the main square of Koper — the former a concentration point of slow salty power and the latter a center of representation, of commercial and social life.
The works by Andrej Škufca, Katrin Euller, and Miriam Stoney form an alien landscape that remembers this coastal dialectic. It has become part of its DNA, its knowledge, its consciousness — but it is not the same anymore. This pulsating landscape remembers the petola’s patient production and the port’s restless ruckus as something it knew well in the past. But the landscape has evolved — without us, despite us, unbothered by us — and in melancholy moments it shares its electronic ode to a nature that never existed or is now long gone.
Škufca’s sculptural interventions suggest alternate users or use-cases: abstract, unplaceable, slightly menacing? Perhaps furniture for an unknown species, machines for or from a different mode of life — we don’t know. They are speculative prosthetics, functional in unreadable ways or dysfunctional in readable ones. Euller’s sound installation takes the artificial into overdrive, creating speculative resonance and a thick acoustic fog — not ambient as backdrop, but ambient as the matrix that envelops us. It is a zone you move through, or that moves through you. In the meanwhile Stoney’s short texts drift between narrative and non-narrative, inference and refusal. They do not explain; they translate — not in clear and known language, but like an unstable, arhythmic radio signal. But hey: isn’t the medium the message anyway?
Together, these works evoke a sort of ‘philosophical weird realism’ of the Petola. Not symbolism, not allegory, but proximity to a presence that does not reveal itself. They do not romanticize the alien. They dwell with it. They do not ask what it means. They ask how to stay with it, despite not knowing. What if the most radical politics now is not mastery, but maintenance? Not conquest, but curiosity? Not revelation, but relation?
The salt pans don’t ask to be understood and the port doesn’t ask to be loved. And the Zone — whether in science fiction or Slovenian infrastructure — doesn’t promise catharsis. It promises that you will get a little lost, and you better get comfortable with it. To enter this space is to enter that confusion willingly. Not to solve it, but to dwell in it. To let the alien speak — or not — and to listen anyway.
Curiosity got the better of fear.
We did not close our eyes.
Laura Amann Marìn (1986) is a curator and architect living and working in Vienna. She is a graduate of de Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and currently curator at Kunsthalle Wien alongside WHW collective (What, How & for Whom). Amann is co-founder of Significant Other, a project space and curatorial platform concerned with the overlaps of art and architecture. More recent projects look respectively at madness and insanity as forms of knowledge and at acts of joy, intimacy, desire and sensuality and how they produce spaces for disobedience.
