Curator: Ilija Prokopiev

One of the enduring dangers in addressing complex problems is the tendency to divide situations into binary oppositions, where one side is deemed right and the other wrong. This dualistic framework, as reflected in the name of the exhibition, is a convenient tool for those who hold power, the privileged, the oppressors. It simplifies reality into categories of good and evil, friend and enemy. Such divisions are embedded in the language of power because they make it easier to assign blame rather than confront systemic injustice. Colonialism and its violent legacies rest upon these artificial separations: the “civilized” and “educated” West versus the “tribal” and “primitive” Third World. This compartmentalized worldview, as Frantz Fanon describes it in his seminal book The Wretched of the Earth, has shaped the histories of domination, creating a constant loop in the world’s movement, where there will always be someone to oppress and someone to be oppressed. Therefore, Fanon points out that no matter how violent the revolution against colonial rule is, the struggle does not end with it. Liberation is a long process of persistence. He cautions against the naïve belief that decolonization could be realized only through the revolution or through the goodwill of the colonizers. Instead, he insists that this monumental task, which involves reintroducing humanity to itself in its totality, requires the active participation of the populations on all sides. These populations must awaken, cast off complacency, and abandon the “Sleeping Beauty” posture that has allowed them to tacitly align with colonial power. This process should discredit the imposed Western ideals of the cult of the individual, the pursuit of Enlightenment, and the reverence for Beauty, exposing them as hollow, reduced to fragile ornaments with no relevance to the urgent, collective fight for freedom and justice, and forever changing the dualistic view on the world.

The exhibition Salt in the Wound, Gold in the Vault engages critically with the world we continue to inhabit, a world still deeply marked by colonial legacies that still shape political, economic, and cultural realities today. At the same time, the exhibition gestures toward processes of liberation and transformation. It brings together the artistic voices of Oscar Cueto, Helena Wittmann, Fehras Publishing Practices, Davide Degano and Helena Tahir all coming from or beyond Europe, to explore moments of mutual reconfiguration through artistic practices as a process of liberation. Through their art practices, they present a dialogue between two critical perspectives: artists who confront colonial histories through personal or inherited experience, and artists who, while not direct inheritors of colonial trauma, engage deeply with its cultural, political, and moral weight. Their works transcend geographical and historical boundaries, spanning different artistic media and methodologies, as they interrogate the complex and often uncomfortable relationships between Europe’s colonial past and its contemporary realities.

Fehras Publishing Practices presents their process-based art installation, Wheat Flower, a work that explores the conditions of cultural workers and cultural production, encouraging collective exploration through the lens of “labor.” It draws on the legacies of practitioners who situated their work within broader struggles for anti-colonial liberation. The title, referencing the wheat harvest season, invites us to reimagine cultural work as a shared act of cultivation.

Set within the chambers of the Belvedere Bastion, once a key element of Koper’s defense system, Wheat Flower gains a layer of meaning through the dialogue between historical defense strategies and contemporary acts of cultural resilience. By engaging local communities throughout the installation process and through accompanying workshops, the collective creates a temporary space of resistance, nurturing solidarity and camaraderie. In doing so, it offers a renewed reading of resistance, not as an act of aggression, but as a spontaneous, connective force that unites communities in the face of dominant imperial structures. Evolving throughout the exhibition as a generative library, Wheat Flower reflects on cultural production as both a site of resistance and a space for collective learning.

The juxtaposition of photographs and video archival material from Davide Degano’s project Romanzo Meticcio explores photography as a medium that shapes histories, influences politics, and constructs narratives. Historically, also used to legitimize colonial policies and racial hierarchies, photography functioned as a performative tool of exclusion. Degano critically responds to this legacy by employing photography and video as instruments of truth-telling, confronting Italy’s silenced colonial and oppressive past.

Interweaving personal and collective histories, Degano interrogates dominant narratives of Italian identity. Born in Sicily and raised in Friuli to Colombian and Slovenian grandmothers, he works from a position of liminality, blending lived experience with critical reflection. His photographs and videos resist linear storytelling, inviting open interpretation. By foregrounding marginalized perspectives, Degano destabilizes fixed notions of identity, offering a more nuanced and complex understanding of Italy’s cultural fabric.

Essay on Memory by Oscar Cueto is an animated film essay presented alongside an installation of objects and a large-scale drawing. Conceived as a stage for possible cultural futures, the work unfolds through the narration of six interwoven stories. Integrating personal memories with ambiguous and erotic scenes, it proposes an alternative archive that challenges dominant art historical narratives and the ways histories are constructed and remembered.

In Cueto’s practice, culture is understood as inherently mobile, capable of moving and transforming beyond institutional structures. In his works, to sustain culture, it must remain embedded in people’s experiences and memories rather than confined within exclusive institutional frameworks. Here, the survival of culture depends on living memory, not on distant mechanisms of preservation.

Migration is a central theme in Cueto’s work, conceived not only as a metaphor but also as a tangible movement of people, ideas, and artworks, serving as a strategy of resistance against the historical processes of institutionalization and museification rooted in imperial and colonial histories. By linking past and present, Cueto reveals how historical silences continue to shape our ways of remembering and imagining, opening space for alternative futures to emerge.

The Last Sector by Helena Tahir is a profoundly personal and long-term research project that explores themes of migration, displacement, and inherited memory through the lens of her Iraqi heritage. Initiated in 2023, the project began with her first visit to Iraq, where she reconnected with her paternal family. During this pivotal journey, Tahir began gathering archival materials and creating her own photographic documentation, laying the foundation for a body of work that merges intimate experience with broader socio-political narratives.

The title The Last Sector refers specifically to Sector 38 of Sadr City in Baghdad, where her father’s family resides. Yet in Tahir’s work, this precise geographic location transforms into a broader metaphor, a symbolic meeting point for those with shared histories of forced migration, political exile, and the lingering effects of colonial legacies. It becomes a space of empathy and quiet solidarity.

Tahir’s latest body of work continues this inquiry through a new sculptural installation. Comprising a series of suspended reliefs, each object is meticulously crafted using laser-cutting and engraving techniques. The reliefs are formed by layering materials engraved at varying depths, textures, and motifs. Hung at different heights and scales, they create an immersive and dynamic composition within the exhibition space. The installation evokes a sacred atmosphere, an encounter with the hidden and the unspoken. It is a space where silence speaks, and where what remains unsaid is rendered both visible and deeply felt.

With the screening of Helena Wittmann’s film Human Flowers of Flesh, the exhibition expands its inquiry into additional dimensions, engaging directly with the intertwined notions of time and space. Through her cinematic work, Wittmann positions the audience at the very forefront of European colonialism, the Mediterranean Sea, inviting us to navigate its historical and political currents.

The film follows Ida, the central protagonist, who lives aboard a ship with a crew of five men. While in Marseille, her curiosity is piqued by the enigmatic, male-dominated world of the French Foreign Legion. Determined to trace its legacy across the Mediterranean, Ida and her crew set sail via Corsica toward Algeria, home to the Legion’s historic headquarters. As their journey unfolds, familiar boundaries dissolve, and life at sea fosters a unique sense of shared understanding. As Małgorzata Sadowska notes, fluidity lies at the heart of Helena Wittmann’s film, manifested through the movement of people, ideas, and the sea itself. Guided by a woman, the journey from Marseille to Sidi Bel Abbès traces colonial routes, yet opposes their legacy by assembling a poetic, nomadic crew that drifts between land and water, past and present, evoking a world without borders.

Building on these diverse artistic trajectories, the exhibition, which spans multiple unconventional sites in Koper, actively engages both audiences and local communities through its varied artistic approaches. By critically examining how colonial legacies are remembered, resisted, and reimagined, the participating artists employ anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial methodologies to unsettle dominant historical narratives. Their practices create spaces for critical reflection and propose alternative modes of inhabiting the present, opening pathways toward the emergence of new and plural histories.