Art Fusion – Borderless

An exhibition by the students of the Visual Arts and Design and the Faculty of Education.

From 29 May to 30 June students of Visual Arts and Design and the Faculty of Education present their work at an exhibiton.

The exhibition features students and mentors from the university program in Visual Arts and Design (VUO) at the Faculty of Education, University of Primorska. The project is curated by Vid Lenard, curator and VUO collaborator. The exhibition Art Fusion – Borderless, created within the framework of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica - Gorizia, brings together the students' artistic perspectives.

Through diverse media—including sound installations, performance, collage, video, animation, ceramics, and virtual reality—the authors explore the notion of borders and their borderlessness. The mentors guiding, supporting, and co-creating the exhibition come from diverse artistic and pedagogical fields: Asist. Mag. Dragana Sapanjoš, Assoc. Prof. Polonca Lovšin, prof. dr. Tilen Žbona, Assist. Prof. Uroš Zavodnik, izr. prof. mag. Jiri Kočica, prof. Nemanja Cvijanović, asist. Lara Marconi, and Assist. prof. Peter Ciuha. Together with the students, they shape an exhibition project that is not only a presentation of artworks but also a communal exploration of borders, belonging, and freedom.

At the Paternolli Gallery, Eric Pibernik presents sound installation Take Your Protein Pills and Put Your Helmet On, a meditation on birth and death, under the mentorship of Sapanjoš and Lovšin. In the same space, Jakob Bratušek’s installation BARBARAian (mentored by Žbona) addresses the manipulative effects of advertising, while Magdalena Strniša’s Bili On Joy, mentored by Sapanjoš and Lovšin, questions collective consciousness subjected to pop culture. Asja Turnšek’s ceramic poetics in Watch Out (mentored by Kočica) speak of decay and vulnerability, and Karmen Badovent’s VR project Who Are You, the One Who Watches? (mentored by Zavodnik) raises questions of digital identity. In the installation Razoring, Tilen Prelič (mentored by Žbona) touches on pain and marginalization. We can also see the preformans Comfort 32 which is about dezorientation an paradox of freedom by Isidora Petrov (mentored by Sepanjoš, Lovšin).

At GO! 2025 AVD center, a space dedicated to screens and projection, several artists are presented. Sara Mašić’s poetic work Border (mentored by Cvijanović and Marconi) explores the symbolism of light as understanding. Iva Gjorgijevska’s Covet (mentored by Sepanjoš, Lovšin) guides us through the cyclical world of desire, Tia Štefančič’s video titled It's All the Same (mentored by Žbona) records the vanishing of spatial uniqueness, while Ana Južnič embodies a utopian future of sisterhood with her extensive performance (H)ARMON(Y) (mentored by Kočica). Svt Pregelj decodes the meaning of the word as a boundary of language and thought in the video ARGI (mentored by Njemanja, Sepanjoš). Neža Hajnšek and Blažka Šifrer (mentored by Sapanjoš) present two video works: Musical Chairs addresses questions of gender quotas and the illusion of equality, while the art work named The Name of Something Real problematizes responsibility and the understanding of personal decisions in contemporary society.

At Dam Restaurant, mentor Peter Ciuha presents his own video work alongside collages created by first-year students, which explore contemporary identity, fragmentation, and visual expression through the collage technique. The exhibition raises essential questions of contemporary society: who are we, where are the borders between the real and the digital, the individual and the collective, the past and the future? The artworks combine personal stories, social phenomena, and technological experiments to form a complex network of visual and conceptual reflections on the modern world. With the Borderless project and Art Fusion exhibition we open a space where boundaries are merely temporary concepts—constantly transgressed by art.