One Sculpture After Another

One Sculpture after Another is a site-specific outdoor installation conceived for the exhibition Museum in the Street at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana. Positioned within a public green space originally designed for civic use—opposite one of the city’s first modernist housing blocks—the work reflects on the shifting role of art within the urban fabric, where spaces intended for collective experience are increasingly reoriented toward spectacle and tourism. The installation takes the form of a container-like structure clad in black ceramic tiles, silk-screened with images of endemic Slovenian species. By day, its reflective surface returns the gaze of the passer-by; by night, a dim internal light reveals only an empty interior. This oscillation between reflection and absence foregrounds the viewer’s position, transforming the casual passer-by into observer, tourist, or voyeur—one whose gaze activates the work.

Drawing on modernist display strategies and architectural languages of control and visibility, the installation stages a regulated encounter between subject and object. By re-appropriating modernist approaches in architecture, One Sculpture after Another critically reflects on the status of the art object in contemporary circumstances—particularly as it moves into public space and becomes subject to new regimes of viewing, consumption, and interpretation. In doing so, the work addresses the conditions under which site-specificity may produce or reinforce geopolitical exoticisms, positioning cultural difference as something to be framed, consumed, and circulated within the contemporary visual economy.