| Artists: Miha Avanzo, Lela B. Njatin, Viktor Bernik, Miłosz Biedrzycki, Klaus Groh, Matjaž Hanžek, John Held, Niels Lomholt, Milenko Matanovič, Vlado Martek, Peter Mlakar, David Nez, Paula and Goran Rem, Johannah Rodgers, Edward Sanders, Klara Sax, Nina Slejko Blom and Conny Blom, Bálint Szombathy, Andrej Tišma, Slaven Tolj, Rudi Uran.

This group exhibition is based on the tradition of mail art and the Westeast project (1978–1985), featuring international artists from nine different countries: Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, Germany, Poland, the USA, Slovenia, Serbia, and Sweden. The project is an homage to the collectivity that formed around the international avant-garde group Westeast (1978–1985), initiated by Franci Zagoričnik, in which Najtin herself participated. She participated in Gallery Nova in Zagreb in 1981 as a co-editor for the 6th issue of the Westeast, titled Mail Love Art.

This exhibition is both an act and the result of research into the collectivity generated by mail art activities. Lela B. Njatin invited people with whom she had previously connected professionally to a new ad hoc collective.

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Lela B. Njatin (1963) graduated in philosophy and comparative literature from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She received her doctorate in humanities with a thesis on avant-garde theory. She lives in Kočevje and Ljubljana. Njatin is a writer, essayist, and visual artist. For her visual work in 2025, she was awarded the Ivana Kobilca Award of the Society of Fine Artists of Ljubljana, and for her literary work, she received numerous awards and nominations.

As a young artist between 1975 and 1985, she worked with concrete poetry and post-conceptualism. She participated in international art movements through mail art and signalism, publishing in the magazines and anthologies Westeast, Maj75, and Uj Symposion. She exhibited for the first time in 1980 at the Likovni Salon Kočevje in the group exhibition Dasevididasenekidela (with Matjaž Marincelj, Vito Oražem, Ljubica Pavlovec, and Rudi Uran-Dado). The title of the exhibition was a paraphrase of the OHO collective’s anthology of neo-avant-garde poetry Pericarežeracirep, published in 1969 by the Obzor publishing house in Maribor.

Upon arriving to study in Ljubljana, she became part of the inner circle of like-minded individuals surrounding the group Laibach and, subsequently, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). In 1981/82, she co-authored the experimental film What to do, B. Njatin?, produced by ŠKUC in Ljubljana. She also contributed to creating the extravagant and radical visual appearance of Borghesia.
In 1988, her literary work Nestrpnost [Intolerance] was published by the Literary Youth of Slovenia, Ljubljana. Literary critics recognized it as a fragmentary novel because the written word alternates with blank spaces of equal meaning. The artist herself positions it as a work that transitions between the visual and literary fields, linking back to avant-garde art pioneered by Stéphane Mallarmé with his work A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.

The Croatian translation of Intolerance was published nine years after the first edition by Miroslav Mićanović’s Naklada MD, following the 1996 Dayton Agreement. However, a second edition was published in Slovenia as early as 1991. Due to its content related to war as an all-pervading reality, the book was recognized as a literary insight into that very real war (as Tine Hribar notes in the foreword to the second edition). The first edition sold out in two months, while the second Slovenian edition sold out in less than a year.
In 2007, after a decade-long hiatus, she returned to visual arts with the installation Absences. Hommage à Igor Zabel at the group exhibition Every Man is a Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. In 2010, she began the continuous, conceptual, and systematic creation of contemporary visual works, which she has presented in solo and group exhibitions in both gallery and non-gallery spaces in Kočevje, Ljubljana, and elsewhere in Slovenia, as well as in Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and the USA. She exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art in 2015. She previously exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art in 2015.

Image: David Nez & Lela B. Njatin, courtesy of L. B. Njatin

Support: Grad Zagreb, Ministarstvo kulture i medija RH, Občina Kočevje