Music-theatre performance The Triangle of Marko Brecelj (Rotulus Homo Pendulum) in the Wooden Hall of Monfort in Portorož
Piran Coastal Galleries, the Association of Friends of Moderate Progress (DPZN), the DELAK Institute and the House of Extreme Music Theatre (Zagreb) are organising the multimedia performance The Triangle of Marko Brecelj (Rotulus Homo Pendulum) in May, an original work by a group comprising Zlatko Burić Kićo, Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo from Croatia, Dragana Milutinović from Serbia, and Dragan Živadinov and Aljoša Živadinov Zupančič from Slovenia.
The performance, which will be presented in the Wooden Hall of Monfort in Portorož on 9 and 10 May 2026, updates the effects and modality of emancipatory action arising from the theatre practices of the neo-avant-garde group Kugla glumište, in collaboration with theatre, visual and music artists of a similar artistic sensibility to that of Marko Brecelj. The extreme music-theatre project operates in the field of the aesthetics of public and private memory as our common good. It takes as its starting point the artistic work of the poet, performer, musician and activist Marko Brecelj. It draws on his many forms of artivism and opens his diary “Dodogovor”, which breaks down the distinctions between the public and the private, the historical and the current, the absolute and the contingent.
Project partners are: Municipality of Piran, Avditorij Portorož, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Ustanova pohorski bataljon, AMZS, City of Zagreb, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Kultura nova Foundation, Jazz Denmark.
Admission is free with a complimentary ticket, which can be obtained online or at the Avditorij Portorož box office. The number of tickets is limited.
Exhibition by the renowned designer Dragan Sakan, entitled Sakan and Piran, at the Herman Pečarič Gallery in Piran
Dragan Sakan (1950–2010), a psychologist by profession, was a pioneer of advertising in Serbia and other countries in the region. He was a creative director, a visionary and a man of success, one of the first recognisable figures in our business environment. For him, advertising was not merely a profession, but a way of life. With his passion and drive, he shaped the advertising industry and gathered around him the finest creators of the former Yugoslavia. His guiding principle in life was simple yet incisive: to help people and companies shine in their full brilliance.
Sakan was closely connected with Piran, the town that, through him, found its place on the world map of creativity. Ideas that marked his creative path were born here: from his move to Studio Marketing Delo to the development of the global Saatchi & Saatchi network in the Balkans, the founding of the New Moment agency and the Idea Campus festival.
In honour of his memory, in 2011 his family donated to the Municipality of Piran a bronze sculpture made according to his concept. It represents Piran as a cultural and creative town and is located by the sea in front of Tartini Theatre. This year, Piran once again pays tribute to him, this time with the exhibition Sakan and Piran, created in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in Slovenia, First Counsellor Aleksandar Gatalica, the Sakan family and his friends, with the support of the Municipality of Piran and Piran Coastal Galleries. The display reveals selected photographs from his early creative years and his first encounters with Piran, as well as from the period of his greatest successes, which he shared with this town. It also encompasses the time when he lived in Piran and hosted legends of world art and advertising there. A special place is reserved for moments of inspiration – on the boat New and in Tartini Square, where “we see most beautifully with the heart”.
The curators of the exhibition, which will open at the Herman Pečarič Gallery on Thursday, 14 May 2026 at 6 pm, are Lazar Sakan and Slavoljub Stanković. It will be on view until 16 August 2026.
More information at the link …
Major retrospective exhibition by Bernhard Rüdiger, entitled Failed Again (Seventh Trumpet), at the Piran City Gallery
From May until the end of the summer, the Piran City Gallery will host a major solo exhibition by the internationally renowned artist Bernhard Rüdiger (Rome, 1964), which is ranked among a select group of central exhibitions of national importance. The exhibition, which will open on Friday, 22 May 2026, at 7 p.m., will present a selection of key works from his rich, almost forty-year creative oeuvre: sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, sound projections, film and more.
Rüdiger developed his artistic expression in dialogue with the social, political and historical upheavals of the period 1985–2025, which was also his most intense creative period. His outstanding works of art are not merely visual objects, but interventions that include sound, vibrations and the visitor’s bodily experience. The purpose of the display is to move the viewer from a passive to an active role and to present art as something perceived with the whole body, through all the senses, and not only through sight. His sculptures and spatial installations raise the question of how we perceive form and art at a time when historical forces (wars, violence, neoliberal capitalism, natural disasters) shape our reality. The artist’s interest lies in transcending the boundaries of aesthetics and opening reflection on global relations of power, invisible borders, violence and the economy as a driving force of contemporary conflicts. The artist’s reflection on the relationship or interaction between art, society and contemporary history will also connect us with a broader understanding of contemporary art and global artistic currents.
The curators of the exhibition are Mara Ambrožič Verderber, director of PCG, and Matic Bukovac. The University of Lyon (UDL): École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) and the Terra Museum from Kikinda, Serbia, are also collaborating on the exhibition.
A rich accompanying programme will be organised alongside the exhibition. Already on Saturday, 23 May 2026, while the artist is still in Piran, he will join us for a trilingual guided tour of the exhibition at 11 a.m.
More information at the link …
Collaboration with the Department of Visual Arts and Design of the Faculty of Education, University of Primorska.
The Meduza Gallery in Koper will host two projects created in collaboration with the Faculty of Education of the University of Primorska. The first is the one-day performance Overscroll, which will be presented at the Meduza Gallery on Tuesday, 5 May 2026, by author Marko Mladenović, a student of UP PEF VUO, under the mentorship of prof. Nemanja Cvijanović. The performance refers to the greatest problem of the 21st century: addiction to social networks and mobile phones. Overload with unnecessary information, which blocks our ability to think and reason, leads to illnesses of the modern age such as depression, anxiety, alienation and dehumanisation. Since we are all forced to have mobile phones, this problem becomes a problem for all of us; in other words, the whole world shares the same problem. The sponsor of the performance is the company Paloma.
This will be followed by the project Urban Laboratory, conceived in 2024 by Prof. Dr. Boštjan Bugarič. Under his mentorship, first-year students of the Department of Visual Arts and Design (UP PEF VUO) will create new work. The gallery exhibition space serves as a unified research framework in which texts, space, image and sound intertwine in a shared narrative. The exhibition is not merely a presentation of the final result, but an open field of knowledge production, where documentary approaches, artistic practices and spatial interventions meet while still in the process of being created. Urban Laboratory II will begin at the Meduza Gallery on 12 May; the exhibition will open on Thursday, 28 May, and will be on view until 5 June 2026.
More information at the link…
Pedagogic and andragogical activities
In May, we continue with pedagogic workshops and guided tours related to the current exhibitions: Piran Coastal Galleries – 50 Years of Contemporary Art, a selection from the Herman Pečarič Collection, and All Monsters Are Human.
As every year, with the warmer spring weather, the Let’s Sculpt Together! workshops will begin in the Forma viva Portorož sculpture park. We are also continuing with andragogical workshops dedicated to older citizens, which take place every first Monday of the month at the Školjka Day Centre in Piran.
Piran Coastal Galleries are taking part in the School of Culture, an intensive three-day national cultural-art education project aimed at connecting educational institutions and cultural organisations at the regional level (European Social Fund Plus and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia) for pupils in the third triad of primary schools and students of secondary schools (2025–2029).
More information will be published on the PCG website.
You are cordially invited; we look forward to meeting you.
