Poljanski nasip 40
SI- 1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–7pm
info@cukrarna.art
Dexter Sinister: Grey Area
October 2, 2024–September 30, 2025
You find yourself somewhere in-between: a grey area on the mezzanine floor of Cukrarna Gallery, a large public arts centre in the centre of Ljubljana. This intermediate space has lower ceilings than the white-cube gallery floors that sandwich it above and below. It wasn’t designed to be an exhibition space, but rather a place for events, conversations, gatherings, and other temporary activities. From September 2024 it has been decorated and programmed by Dexter Sinister, the composite working name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey.
Look around: the room is lined with wall-to-wall medium-grey carpet and the walls are painted to match; windows are masked to modulate the sun and filter an even, grey light. It’s mostly empty except for a few bean bags and a couple of tables, all in matching grey as well. In this space, Dexter Sinister presents one video each month by a designer, artist, or group whose work exists somewhere in the middle of art and design.
As you enter, on the left are a series of white rectangles, each painted according to a standard video aspect ratio. Projected into one of these, depending on when you are reading this, is a video. In the first six months, these have included works by Dexter Sinister, Virgil Abloh, Linda van Deursen, Seth Price, and Gilbert Again. The next six months includes videos by Lucy McKenzie, Shannon Ebner, Aurélien Froment, and Stand Up Comedy. Videos are available in-person and online at grey-area.cukrarna.art.
Publishing programme of Cukrarna Gallery
Cukrarna Gallery develops its publishing programme alongside its exhibition programme by regularly publishing exhibition catalogues which feature visual documentation, interviews with the artists, and newly commissioned texts in English and Slovene by international writers, curators, and researchers. These catalogues are conceived both as companions or extensions of each exhibition and as a series of books that function as a work-in-progress record of the gallery’s programme.
Catalogues for solo exhibitions, referred to as exhibition notebooks, feature layouts which reflect the layout of the exhibition, while type experiments and different materials are selected to echo exhibition themes or individual elements of exhibited works—or to contrast them sharply. These can take the shape of golden foil drawing on recycled-wool paper for Meta Grgurevič: Scraping for Gold (2022) catalogue, or the sandpaper dust cover for Tarek Atoui: Standing Waves (2024) catalogue referencing the tactile aspect of some of the exhibited works.
Catalogues for group exhibitions, on the other hand, mirror the curatorial framework. For Extended Vision (2024), a group exhibition featuring works that engaged the visitor’s senses, the catalogue was designed using French fold binding which features back-folded pages, so that each page appeared doubled. Or the most recent catalogue, for the group exhibition Layering (2025), which features multiple paper stocks in different sizes.
Cukrarna Gallery has published catalogues of group exhibitions The Wonderfulness of Memory (2021), Returning the Gaze (2022), The Figurative (2023), Extended Vision (2024), and Layering (2025), and catalogues of solo exhibitions by Maruša Sagadin (Wet Feet, 2022), Meta Grgurevič (Scraping for Gold, 2022), Rosa Barba (Exhibition Notes, 2022), Michelangelo Pistoletto (Fourth Generation, 2023), Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (Reading Reading, 2023), Saša Spačal (The Library of Fallen Tears, 2023), Flaka Haliti (I SHOUT, YOUR ECHOES BOUNCE, WHAT AM I?, 2023), Adrian Paci (Waves & Gazes, 2024), Mark Požlep (Permanent Vacation, 2023), and Tarek Atoui (Standing Waves, 2024). Exhibition catalogues of Nicolás Lamas (Scenarios for Coexistence, 2024), Šejla Kamerić (Perfect Tense, 2024), and Aleksandra Vajd & Annetta Mona Chişa (Tar Star, 2025) are coming soon. Also in the works is the photo book Ulay & Marina Abramović: Love, Hate, Forgiveness, in collaboration with Buchhandlung Walther König, featuring never-before-published photos, which is scheduled for summer release. The catalogue ART VITAL: 12 Years of Ulay / Abramović is to follow in November as well as the 7th edition of CUKR magazine.
