Mirjana Rukavina, From the Torso Series

Mirjana Rukavina has a classical education in the fine arts. She completed her studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and studied art education at the Faculty of Education in Maribor.

She is well acquainted with the central role of the torso—the human trunk without head and limbs—in the history of Western art. Beginning with the Belvedere Torso, a fragment of a marble sculpture of a nude male figure dating most likely to the final centuries BCE, this work had a decisive impact on representations of the human body in later periods and, in turn, significantly shaped perceptions of the body in Western culture.

It is therefore no coincidence that the artist chose the torso as a motif through which she simultaneously addresses her own personal history and the broader history of humanity over recent centuries—an era in which science and technology have enabled increasing transparency and control, while at the same time revealing our growing fragility and vulnerability.

We are confronted daily with evidence of atrocities committed by members of the human species across the world, while remaining largely powerless in the face of them. The more we know about ourselves and the better we understand ourselves, the further we seem to drift from our humanity.

The exhibition Iz serije torzo (From the Torso Series), in which the artist creates a striking interplay between personal narrative and the contemporary condition of the world, represents an important turning point in her oeuvre. While her earlier work explored the human body under the pressures of technology and social demands through personal experience, this exhibition opens up a perspective on its collective dimension and on the social as an essential yet often neglected part of our humanity.

Between Trauma and Play

At the heart of the exhibition at the Minoriti Cultural Quarter is the watercolor series From the Torso Series, created between 2023 and 2025. The unfinished and fragmentary nature of the motif—the human body without a head or limbs—is further emphasized by the cryptic quality of Mirjana Rukavina’s watercolors. The contours and folds of the depicted torsos are barely discernible and bear no distinctly recognizable individual features. As the artist herself explains, each torso is a specific study of a body and of the woman behind it. These are women of different ages, conditions, and embodied experiences. For Rukavina, the torso, as the central part of the female body, is a point of identification; it is trauma and reality, yet also play and escape.

The monochromatic palette and subtle color variations of the individual watercolors, together with details such as the perforated edges revealing sheets torn from a sketchbook, emphasize repetition and everyday routine. At the same time, the delicate use of varying degrees of watercolor transparency and the softness of the lines—clearly bearing traces of the artist’s hand—introduce elements of chance and subjectivity, playfulness and joy, into these representations.

This tension between constraint and freedom, trauma and play, is echoed in other watercolors from the same period included in the exhibition. Examples include The Palace (2022) and, most notably, the remarkable Discotheque (2022), which, in my view, comes closest to an (impossible) representation of the way life and dreams imperceptibly flow into one another. In the architectural watercolors, ambiguity and anxiety are conveyed through motifs such as roofless buildings, collapsing or barely standing columns, as well as symbolic elements like a black or orange sun. Most striking, however, is the recurring motif of the letter “V,” which disrupts and destabilizes otherwise established architectural compositions.

As the artist notes:

“There is always some disturbance or element that signals a shift in perception, both in the torsos and in the architectural works. Ambiguity guides my practice and serves as a constant source of inspiration.”

Embrace

The Belvedere Torso is renowned for depicting the human trunk in a twisted, curved pose. The curved torso also serves as a point of departure for Mirjana Rukavina’s exhibition. As an adolescent, she wore an orthopedic brace—the Milwaukee brace—to treat scoliosis, a condition characterized by curvature of the spine. This experience profoundly shaped her artistic trajectory from the very beginning. Particularly notable is her video performance Milwaukee (1999), accompanied by both black-and-white and color films shot on 8mm film stock.

Rukavina began her career as a painter and has been working with photography since 2002. Among her most acclaimed projects are Beauty Archives (2002–2004) and Fashion Untitled (2016–2022). From the Torso Series sheds light on a different, less widely known aspect of her artistic practice. Yet here too, her embodied experience of wearing an orthopedic brace occupies a central position.

Among the four early abstract works included in the exhibition is Multiplied (1998), an ornament composed of glass elements mounted on a one-square-meter stainless steel panel. At first glance, the work resembles a computer motherboard; in reality, however, its key motif is once again the brace. The glass elements, hand-ground at the renowned Slovenian glassworks Rogaška, are secured within steel clamps in much the same way that the artist’s body was once held within the brace.

As Rukavina explains:

“This physical experience continues to accompany me and is reflected in my choice of materials and my relationship to them, not only in terms of personal testimony, but also through the tension between the fragile and the resilient.”

Untitled, a drawing on paper from 1993, offers a subtle visual exploration of sensory and abstract concepts such as “embrace” (Umarmung) and “union” (Verkuppelung). At the entrance to the exhibition are photographs from the Milwaukee series, together with one of the artist’s spinal X-rays from the archives of the Orthopaedic Hospital Valdoltra. These images were used to monitor the progression of treatment for her spinal curvature between the ages of eleven and eighteen.

The Politics of the Visual

Historically, visual technologies have enabled people to see things previously unknown to them. The telescope made it possible to see infinitely far; the microscope, infinitely close. These technologies possessed profound epistemological power. Through X-rays, for example, humanity gained knowledge of tuberculosis, a disease whose existence had previously remained invisible.

The Italian psychoanalyst Pietro Bianchi points to another important aspect of nineteenth-century visual technologies: they revealed the collective and social nature of vision itself. The X-ray demonstrated the existence of the gaze as something that precedes seeing. As Jacques Lacan argued, what is seen precedes that which is presented to vision. Or, as Walter Benjamin famously observed about film, it revealed the “optical unconscious.”

The visual field contains something that exists independently of our will, yet fundamentally shapes it—and, through it, shapes us. This dimension prevents vision from being purely subjective. Others are always already present.

This idea forms the conceptual foundation of From the Torso Series. The artist’s narrative of personal struggle documents the existence of the gaze as something that precedes and structures vision itself. Mirjana Rukavina’s spinal X-ray reveals scoliosis—a curvature of the spine—as a condition that, within the logic of her personal development, was considered something to be corrected. It thus justified therapeutic procedures aimed at disciplining her body. Viewed historically, the motif of the torso functions in a similar manner: it establishes normative frameworks through which the human body is perceived.

Today, however, the power of the gaze that once shaped and disciplined bodies—particularly female bodies—has become diluted within an overwhelming abundance of images. Its authority has been challenged countless times. Women, including Mirjana Rukavina in her photographic portrait series Beauty Archives, have reclaimed the gaze for themselves. The polyphony of marginalized voices has become a defining feature of the global art scene.

Yet the danger today lies elsewhere. Within this endless proliferation of images, even those capable of empowering us have lost much of their force.

We have become desensitized not only to images that might constrain us, but also to those that could inspire us and prompt action. Conversely, we are losing not only the clear contours of our image—a development that might itself be liberating—but also its substance, its humanity.

By exploring the construction of bodily boundaries—her own body confined within the armor of a brace, and the bodies of others represented through the motif of the torso—Rukavina demonstrates that these boundaries are simultaneously sites of subjugation and spaces of resistance. Her work invites reflection on this paradox.

The images of barely recognizable human bodies without heads or limbs, rendered in translucent watercolor washes and lines that seem to meet by chance; the flickering light of black-and-white photographs; words penciled onto paper; and the coarse grain of an X-ray image—all appear as though they might vanish at any moment. Fragile and ephemeral, they embody the very condition they depict.

Through this rich imagery of transience, Rukavina opens a perspective onto fragility itself, locating it at the very core of the contemporary crisis of humanity.

Melita Zajc
Exhibition text for From the Torso Series.

The exhibition is open from

07 Jul 2026 - 08 Aug 2026

Wednesday to Sunday, from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM.