UL ALUO highlights: award-winning student projects: Ana Janež and Ponjava s5

The series comprises ten exhibitions throughout 2026, showcasing award-winning projects by UL ALUO students created during the 2024/25 academic year. The programme offers an insight into the current work of a new generation of artists, designers and researchers, while bringing their work into the urban environment and directly into the view of passers-by.

Kristina Filipović, Rene Ketiš, Petja Muck, Marko Petrović, Miha Rauch, Pia Sovinc, Jernej Strmšek, Iva Suhadolnik Gregorin, Ana Rogač

UL ALUO Award 2024/2025 for the realisation of the public interdisciplinary project Ponjava s5

Master’s study programme (second cycle) in Visual Communication Design, specialisations in Photography and Graphic Design

Mentors: Assoc. Prof. Peter Koštrun, Asst. Prof. Emina Djukić, Assoc. Prof. Peter Rauch

The fifth edition of the Ponjava exhibition project explored the concept of space—both the space we inhabit and the space we would like to inhabit. The participating students demonstrated their ability to act as an organisational, production and support structure, seeking connections not only between specialisations and departments within the Academy but also challenging the boundaries of the medium through which they engage with public space. In a former shop at Miklošičeva 34, they thoughtfully created a space that critically addressed both the use of space and the content associated with it.

The visual identities, spatial installations and promotional materials were conceived not merely as archival material or individual creative contributions, but as integral components of the entire project, conceptually connected to the exhibition space itself. Furthermore, the complex process of creating a public presentation of student work from all study programmes at UL ALUO required the participants to seek support beyond established institutional structures. After all this, Ponjava s5 received considerable and well-deserved support from the media and the wider public.

Ana Janež

UL ALUO Award 2024/2025 for the master’s thesis Fiksacija trajanja, fluidnost pomena in strategije dvoumnosti / Si upaš verjeti v nekaj tako negotovega? [Fixation of Duration, Fluidity of Meaning and Strategies of Ambiguity / Do You Dare to Believe in Something So Uncertain?]

Master’s study programme (second cycle) in Painting, specialisation in Painting

Mentors: Prof. Dr Uršula Berlot Pompe, Prof. Žiga Kariž

This series of paintings stems from an exploration of the image as a space in which archives, memory and processes of transformation intertwine. The artist uses her own photographs, scanned objects and found fragments as starting points, digitally dismantling and transforming them before reassembling them on canvas. The resulting images become hybrids of the real and the imagined. Through this process, she seeks to establish uncertainty of meaning that arises not merely from obscured references but is embedded in the very process of visual deconstruction, in which an image never remains confined to a single interpretative framework.

At a time when digital archives and algorithms shape our understanding of the past and present, the question of uncertainty becomes particularly pronounced. Ana Janež’s works, too, are constructed as unreliable structures through which she translates the ways in which memory overlaps, changes and is reinterpreted. In their new configurations, the images acquire autonomy and move into different contexts. Rather than stable representations, they create pictorial spaces that remain open and fluid, both in their formal composition and in their range of meanings.