Olja Triaška Stefanović is a photographer originally from Yugoslavia living in Slovakia. In her latest project entitled Yutopislavia, she focuses on her relationship with Yugoslavia's past and explores the historical memory of her generation. Triaška visits and photographically documents various places in the former Yugoslavia. In the exhibition realised for the Artwall gallery, she presents photographs from the storage room of the Museum of Antun Augustinčić, Tito's “court” sculptor.
 
The photographs, featuring an effect reminiscent of artificial laboratory lighting, show unexpected assemblages and fragments of sculptures: soldiers, a hand holding a gun, a horse torso, a naked female figure and the famous statue of Marshal Tito. The style of the sculptures corresponds to the monumental realist sculpture of the time; Augustinčić worked from the 1930s to the 1950s. The niches that make up the Artwall gallery were built in the 1950s and timewise correspond to the theme of the exhibition. The sculptures intended for the public space thus move from the interior of the museum storage to the public space and regain their monumental dimension.
 
After the establishment of Yugoslavia, Augustinčić, who knew Tito from the partisan resistence movement, became an official artist, whose task was to materialize political ideals by means of his sculptures. For the UN headquarters in New York, he created a peace monument in the form of a horsewoman with an olive branch. The utopia of Yugoslavia, which was based on the ideas of peace, solidarity and coexistence of nations, ended in a disaster as an unfulfilled idealistic political experiment.
 
Olja Triaška Stefanović symbolically depicts the ideals of that time put away in storage. The relationship of contemporaries and the artist to this historical period is ambivalent. It is based on questions rather than clear answers. Yutopislavia is a country that never existed, but might have existed in another time and with different people.
 
The artist says of her series, "Yutopislavia tells a deeply visual and personal story of my cultural heritage and upbringing during the Cold War, situated between East and West within the Non-Aligned Movement in the former Yugoslavia. I question what aspects of Yugoslavia's history have been forgotten or overlooked and how members of my generation identify with the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement."
 
The relics of the sculptural and ideological past at Artwall Gallery also raise questions about the nature of the present. With the abandonment of grand narratives in past decades, ideals have often left political reality. Olja Triaška Stefanović comments on the legacy of her exhibition and the lessons of the past: “Now, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are facing new global crises and the threat of a new (hot) Cold War. We need to discuss the importance of democracy, the threats posed by wars, nuclear weapons and the dangers that dictatorships and autocratic political regimes can bring to humanity."

About the artist: Olja Triaška Stefanović is a visual artist and a photographer born in Novi Sad in the former Yugoslavia. During the Balkan Wars in the 1990’s, she settled in Slovakia, Bratislava, where she now lives and works. She is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Fulbright Scholarship, at Parsons School of Design / The New School in New York, NY where she conducted the visual research related to the Cold War. She is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (AFAD) in Bratislava, where she is leading the Studio of Photography and Critical Practice and currently the Head of the Department of Photography and New Media. Many of her previous exhibition projects focused on the historical, political and cultural context of former Yugoslavia and consequences of the civil war in the 1990s. Beside this topic, in her visual researches she shows a special interest in the space, history and architecture of Eastern Europe. She regularly exhibits both in Slovakia and internationally and won many prizes for her artistic works; in 2010 she was the finalist for the 333 Award at the National Gallery in Prague, CZ and in 2015 she was announced as Photographer of the Year in Slovakia. Her latest authors book “Brotherhood and Unity” was presented in Slovakia, New York, San Francisco, Vienna, Ljubljana. Her work are part of permanent collections at Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava and City Gallery at Nitra, Slovakia. She lives and works in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Curators: Lenka Kukurová, Zuzana Štefková

The exhibition is part of Festival Fotograf https://2024.fotografestival.cz/

The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Prague and the Municipal District of Prague 7 and State Fund of Culture Czech Republic. Media partners of the project are Artmap, Radio 1, GoOut.