Two immersive installations by jiawen uffline and by Maja Bojanić and Brin Žvan from Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory blur nature's irrational forces with institutional critique and artivism. Both works invite visitors to participate in order to activate them. The exhibition explores ideas of communication and sustainability and creates a parallel realm where visitors gain agency.
Exhibiting artists
Struggles Beyond Repair
Earthside Wish Machine
ufflines’ Earthside Wish Machine creates on NATO communication technology from the 1960s. When meteors enter the atmosphere at high speeds, friction and heat create hot plasma trails that are used to reflect radio waves, resulting in extremely brief windows of opportunity for data transmission. Even today, the consistent reliability of flying meteors serves as a military fallback solution for satellite communications. With Earthside Wish Machine, jiawen uffline transforms obsolete tech into a personal wish transmitter. It establishes a network that is connected by ionised glowing air and military radar signals instead of copper or fibreglass, thus our wishes are mediated with cyclical meteors instead of strategic algorithms.
In Struggles Beyond Repair, Maja Bojanić and Brin Žvan explore the crumbling Institute for Mold Preservation, a fictional NGO founded in 2022 to study mold (particularly Stachybotrys chartarum) in public institutions and promote sustainable models for the preservation of natural and cultural heritage. In 2025, the Institute faces the prospect of collapse due to numerous crises: material, ethical, and administrative. Throughout the extended video game Struggles Beyond Repair, you sift through digital files and physical drawers to uncover a musty underbelly where the pressure of unsolvable crises is sapping away the very subject the Institute was founded to preserve. Ritualised procedures delay the inevitable decay and reflect late-capitalist institutions that prioritise self-preservation over their actual mission. Players become accomplices in maintaining the façade, while molecular resistance emerges: sustainability as persevering decay. The works in the exhibition connect questions of interaction, maintenance and yearning with nature as medium, as a channel of transmission, and as a site through which existing structures can be transferred into subversive and irrational forms.
Exhibition dates: bb15, Hafnerstraße 4
14. – 16. May 2026 | (Opening hours: Everyday, 10:00-19:00)
18. – 22. May 2026 | (Opening hours: Tue-Sat, 15:00-18:00)
> Guided tour & vernissage: Thursday, May 14th, 17:00
"Struggles Beyond Repair"
Production: Ljudmila, Art and Science Laboratory (2025)
With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Department for Culture of the Municipality of Ljubljana.
Authors: Maja Bojanić & Brin Žvan
Sound design: Gašper Torkar
The exhibition is a cooperation between bb15 – Space for Contemporary Art and AMRO2026 - Art Meets Radical Openness Festival.
Press release: Decay and Desire↗
