Dear Father

RAVNIKAR, SKICA, and frontviews 

present at HAUNT

 

Dear Father

Maja Babič Košir, Helena Tahir and Nevena Aleksovski

 

curated by Piera Ravnikar

 

 

Vernissage 

Fri 17 Apr 6 – 9 pm

 

Finissage 

Sat 16 May 4 – 8 pm

Vernissage 

Fri 17 Apr 6 – 9 pm

 

Exhibition Talk
Sat 18 Apr 5 – 7 pm

Dear Father
– Between materialized memory and familiar reflections – 

with Maja Babič Košir, Helena Tahir, Nevena Aleksovski, Stephan Klee and Saša Šavel Burkardt 

Together, we will introduce the exhibited positions and their background. We will try to identify patterns and connections between the works. Based on this, we will examine the role of the father both in today's family structures and in terms of its implications for society as a whole today.
The conversation will be held in English, and we will also open the talk to the audience. 

 

 

Artist Talk with Helena Tahir
Sat 2 May 5 – 7 pm
Tracing Vanished Relations
moderated by Stephan Klee

...

"The work of Slovenian artist Helena Tahir revolves around questions of memory, heritage and identity. Many of her projects take their starting point from her personal family history, particularly her exploration of her father’s past, as he was forced to flee Iraq under a repressive regime."

...

 

The open dialogue between the artist and curator Stephan Klee will explore the artistic impulses behind family research and examine the question of to what extent subjective experiences of loss, absence, and longing can and should manifest themselves in works of art. Fundamentally, the conversation also explores the potential of contemporary art to serve as a counterweight or a balancing force against a globalized, violence-based politics of social fragmentation and cultural disruption. 

 

The talk will be held in English  

 

 

Finissage 

Sat 16 May 4 – 8 pm

 

In Dear Father, the practices of Maja Babič Košir, Helena Tahir and Nevena Aleksovski converge to explore the father figure as a site of complexity, tension, and quiet resonance. Their works differ in medium, form, and aesthetic language, yet together they compose a constellation of traces: omission and reverence, rupture and tenderness, memory and transformation. Situated within broader discourses on kinship, inheritance, and archival practice, the exhibition treats the father not merely as a familial presence but as a structural, historical, and symbolic one.

 

The exhibition does not seek reconciliation nor articulate a single paternal narrative. Instead, it cultivates attentiveness and reflection, dwelling on what remains unspoken, unsent, or irretrievable. The father appears as both anchor and fracture, origin and fissure, an unstable locus resonating across temporal, geographic, and emotional registers. Personal histories intersect with wider structures of migration, labor, and remembrance, linking intimate traces to collective experience.

 

Central to the exhibition is the notion of absence, understood as an active and generative force. Silence, incompleteness, and fragment function as both conceptual and material strategies, shaping the terrain of memory, desire, and imagination. Temporal layers coexist: archives hold the past, performative gestures inhabit the present, and imagination projects possible futures. In dialogue with feminist archival practice, postwar memory art, and contemporary meditations on kinship, Košir, Tahir, and Aleksovski reveal the father figure as mutable, refracted, reassembled, and carried forward through time.

 

In Say Something Nice to Me, Košir engages her father’s archive not to preserve, but to transform. Sketches, prototypes, and fragments of letters and notes become sculptural gestures that trace his presence without sentimentality. In the Love Letters series (2018–), found and familial materials are reshaped to explore memory, absence, and the lingering weight of loss, while the archive becomes a quiet partner in reflection. Through these interventions, the father emerges not as he once was, but as he reverberates through objects, forms, and the attention they carry.

 

The Last Sector (2024–) traces Helena Tahir’s journey to Iraq, her father’s homeland, exploring landscapes shaped by displacement, political upheaval, and family history. Combining carbon-tracing drawings, archival fragments, photographs, and personal letters, the work weaves a layered narrative of memory and belonging. Her father appears through traces and recollections—intimate, historically situated, and marked by exile and absence. The project embraces the impossibility of full retrieval while highlighting the generative potential of attentive inquiry, allowing fragmented personal and historical traces to converge into a quiet, reflective meditation on identity, inheritance, and connection.

 

In Melancholy of the Abandoned Lands (2022–), Aleksovski situates her father’s life as a miner in Bor, Serbia, within broader histories of industrial labor, migration, and post-socialist transition. Mining functions both as subject and metaphor, an act of extraction that sustains yet estranges, providing life while eroding the very ground it depends on. Archival photographs are enlarged, fractured, and redrawn into constellations where presence and void converge, alongside a series of drawings. Through this process, the artist revisits her father’s life and her own origins, negotiating intimacy and distance, and allowing private memory to expand into the collective.

 

Dear Father activates silence, incompleteness, and distance as methods of inquiry. Letters never sent, refracted images, and archives that resist closure open space for thought beyond resolution. The father figure is never only familial; it is structural, cultural, and political. Through transformation and reconfiguration, Košir, Tahir, and Aleksovski turn private inheritance into shared reflection. The unfinished gesture becomes a site of possibility; questions remain suspended; and absence itself becomes a material for thought. Here, absence is not lack but a medium through which the father is continually reimagined.