At the exhibition with the title Somewhere Near, Helena Tahir will present her drawings, prints and frottages from the cycles The Poetics of Childhood and Jesenice.

In Helena Tahir’s drawings and prints, influences from another culture, much older than Slavic culture, can be seen. There are echoes of the ancient Persian culture in her work, which has come to inhabit her through her father. After all, these connections and overlapping layers of memory contained in her genes are reflected already in the exhibition’s title, Somewhere Near. In her work, Helena Tahir leans on tradition and family, on childhood and the different circumstances in which she grew up. As a member of the second generation of immigrants and a child from a mixed family, her experience of the Slovenian dream is completely different. This is why her view of the current Slovenian reality is even more interesting, which she manages to present in an original artistic way.

Helena Tahir is an artist of the younger generation (1992). She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2015, where she also completed her master’s studies in 2021. She spent her childhood in Jesenice, but today she is working and creating between her home town and Ljubljana. In her work, she is both referring to and becoming part of the long and important tradition of printmaking in Slovenia. With the exhibition of prints, drawings and frottages by Helena Tahir, we continue our presentations of Slovenian and foreign graphic artists (Sergej Balenuk, Stojan Brezočnik, Monika Plemen), who work using traditional printing techniques.

The exhibition Somewhere Near was organized in cooperation with the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana and the curator Božidar Zrinski.