Helena Tahir

The Last Sector II

5. 2.–4. 5. 2025

MGLC Švicarija

At MGLC Švicarija we prepare an exhibition at the end of a Young Artists Residency, presenting the artist who has lived and worked with us during the course of the two-year programme. When Helena Tahir moved into Švicarija in the summer of 2023, she had already been working with the International Centre of Graphic Arts. In 2020, we showed her drawings and prints in the exhibition Somewhere Near (2020, curated by Božidar Zrinski). Already then, she impressed with her thoughtful and precise approach and the choice of motifs and figuration used to build up her dense visual narrative. She was also a selected artist in the travelling exhibition of contemporary Slovenian printmaking Contemporary Equals Fresh (2022–2023, curated by Breda Škrjanec, MA), and presented her black-and-white series of linocuts In the Whirl, created in 2018, which are an interplay of fictional and real images with historical references.

The exploration of personal and collective history is a constancy in her art practice. This is particularly evident in her series The Last Sector, in which the history of her family is revealed layer by layer. With the series, Helena Tahir poses the question of when an artwork transcends the boundaries of the artist's subjectivity and personal experience and reaches objective reality. She has already exhibited this body of work at Ravnikar Gallery (2024, curated by Ilija Prokopiev) and has begun to slowly uncover the fate of her family from Iraq, including the story of her father, who left Iraq more than 50 years ago, never to return home. She reconstructs her family's history through various mediums and artistic processes, a kind of work in progress. By appropriating archival material, from newspaper clippings and family albums to family videos and photos, she constructs a kaleidoscopic visual narrative.

Helena Tahir has long followed a personal rule to create every day, even if only for half an hour. This daily "creative training and meditation" is the essence of her meticulous, considered and long-lasting artistic process, which is evident in all her works, including those exhibited at MGLC Švicarija. The first space displays a selection of older works from The Last Sector, while the second space continues the series. Four new prints and a wall painting are exhibited in a space within a space built in the former hotel kitchen. The stencil paintings of the hotel remain partially visible, giving away only a hint of the history of the building. Similarly to the prints created in the MGLC Print Studio with the help of master printmaker Jakob Puh that reveal the history of the artist's family layer by layer. They are made up of found images and models: graphic elements from an old accounts book, the floor plan of a house from Sadr City in Baghdad, a portrait of the Lebanese singer Fairuz and a pattern of an oriental carpet. The screenprints are an experiment with the medium and the image. They are printed on faux leather. The artist and the master printmaker applied glue to it through a sieve, which had to be thickened, otherwise it would have been too thin to print on. Once the glue had dried, she laid gold leaf on the motif, keeping it as flat as possible. The gold leaf was then consolidated with a brush in places where the surface had been overprinted with glue. The gold leaf created a distinctive light reflection that could not have been achieved with printing in gold ink. The print was precise, especially in the thin lines and filigree Arabic letters. Helena Tahir then used a digital embroidery machine to embroider carpet patterns from the family house onto a screenprint with the gilding on faux leather. The embroidery machine can create a precise image based on a preloaded pattern, but the artist occasionally stopped the machine and moved it in different directions. She inserted an error, an interruption, into the precisely formed pattern, just as her family's history has been interrupted several times. The two-dimensionality of the prints is complemented by the wall painting, which duplicates the image and creates an atmosphere of memory.

Helena Tahir (1992, Jesenice) is a visual artist, working in the field of printmaking, painting and drawing. She obtained her Bachelor's degree with honours in Printmaking before going on to complete her Master's degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She studied at the Faculdade de Belas Artes in Porto (Portugal) and at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig (Germany). She has presented her work in several solo exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, including Lamut Art Salon in Kostanjevica na Krki (2018), International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (2020), RAVNIKAR Gallery (2020, 2022, 2024) and group exhibitions such as New Era, Božidar Jakac Gallery(2024) and Contemporary Equals Fresh – travelling exhibition of contemporary Slovenian printmaking in the production of MGLC (2022, China; 2023, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus). She received the Young Artist Commendation at the International Exhibition of Prints and Artists Books in Rijeka (2022). She is also represented at art fairs such as Vienna Contemporary, Vienna (2020, 2022), Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam (2022) and ARCO Lisboa, Lisbon (2024). In 2024, she released her first artist's book The Last Sector, Tracing Back My Father's Unspoken Past, co-published with RAVNIKAR. Between 2023 and 2025, she was selected for a Young Artists Residency at MGLC Švicarija. In addition to her active art practice, she also teaches, including in the Department of Printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. Her works can be found in national and international collections. She lives and works in Ljubljana.

The exhibitions is part of the series From the Studios, which presents the current practice of the artists working at MGLC Švicarija.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, 5 February 2025 at 6 pm at MGLC Švicarija. Damijan Kracina's exhibition Navigation will open at the same time.