Photo: Habicht Ham
2 – 23 September 2025
P74 Gallery
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Dejan Habicht has always had a distinctive style. He has also always impressed us with his exceptional memory, which he enthusiastically shares with the audience. Most of his artistic work has been in the medium of photography. Since 1999, he has embraced the tradition of conceptualism (referring to himself as a professional photographer and conceptual artist to distinguish between the work through which he brings to life other people’s ideas and his own), but even this eventually proved insufficient for him. An artistic narrative took over, leading him to incorporate video, sound, and installation.
In the Until the Last Button exhibition (P74 Gallery, 2015), he delved into the family archive and selected elements from his youth: idols, patterns, objects, and items that had greatly influenced his artistic vision. He assembled these individual elements into a patchwork to present the observer with new puzzles. These items and objects are likewise photographic only to some extent.
While many of their projects, such as Nika Ham’s Dance with Bentham (2019), Morgen (2021) and Dejan Habicht’s exhibition Turnadot (2019), are products of immense mutual support, for this exhibition, they decided to co-author the entire show. They aimed to keep the creative process as conceptually open as possible and create all the works along the way and together, which is why the show’s title reveals pretty much nothing. Much of Ham’s and Habicht’s everyday life is connected to their museum jobs (Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana and Fotografiska Berlin). For this show, they integrate art history references and topics such as artistic depiction, the relationship between life and death, cooperation, and crossing borders into the theme of their specific everyday life, which they have been loyal to for a long time.
The semantically open title of the exhibition allows for a free interchange of media. They’ve chosen the ones that were most accessible to them: in Dejan Habicht’s case, photography, and in Nika Ham’s, video. They’ve assembled this into an exhibition that functions as a unified whole rather than a series of themes, regardless of origin, age, or sexual orientation. This is an exhibition, the starting and ending point of which is of little importance, even though it has only one entrance and exit. This is a play of spectatorship, transformed into a clock that is caught in the infinity of everyday rituals.
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Dejan Habicht is a photographer, conceptual artist, and publicist. He studied philosophy and ethnology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana (1978-1984), where he also earned a degree in ethnology (1984). Between 1987 and 2000, he worked as a freelance photographer, and since 2002, he has been a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana. He was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Fotografija (1997-2007), and he authored several photography workshops for children and adults at the Famul Stuart School of Applied Arts, Youth Care Centre Malči Belič, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has published texts and photographs in magazines such as Ambient/Jana, Ars Vivendi, Fotografija, Hiše, Oris (Zagreb), Revolver (Frankfurt am Main), and Tribuna. He is also active in the medium of artist’s book, in which he has published several editions, including 12 Boring Poems, One Gasoline Station, Please, American Bar, Woodcuts, End of the Line Stations, and 26 Stages of Erection. He has participated in many significant international exhibitions and events of contemporary visual art at home and abroad.
Nika Ham (1991) earned her master’s in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In 2013/2014, she continued her studies at the Winchester School of Art in the UK. During her studies, she participated in several group and solo exhibitions in Zagreb, Berlin, Sopot, Lisbon, New York, and Paris. She is the recipient of the 2020 OHO Group Award. Since 2022, she has been living in Berlin, where she continues to focus on her performative practice.