Tanja Lažetić’s artistic practice moves between the documentary and the intimate, between personal experience and social observation. Working across photography, ceramics, performance, video, and the artist’s book, she explores questions of identity, memory, and corporeality.

The project Non-sens began in March 2020 during her residency at Künstlerhaus Stadttöpferei Neumünster in Germany, as the world was closing down due to the pandemic. At a time when touch was forbidden, the artist created a series of vases pressed together in pairs until they fused into a single body. The material deformed, the hollows collapsed, and the functional vessel turned into an unpredictable sculptural form.

In 2021, in collaboration with a ceramist, she repeated the process for a video work, but the pieces disintegrated as they dried. In 2024, a new series of ten vases – black with blue interiors – was created in Center Rog. The project continues as an on-going work, transforming through repetition and opening new layers of meaning.

The title Non-sens refers to Heidegger’s idea: “The thing-ness of the container by no means rests in the material out of which it is formed but in the emptiness which does the containing.” Lažetić examines whether the essence of a thing lies in its material or in the void that surrounds it. When two vessels merge, they contain nothing but the contact that unites and dissolves them.

Non-sens unfolds the relation between matter and void, between existence and the loss of form. Meaning does not emerge from function but from its collapse – in the moment when the object falls apart and reveals its own inner logic. Within the broader context of Lažetić’s work, the project continues her exploration of the boundaries between presence and disappearance, control and chance.

TANJA LAŽETIĆ (b. 1967) is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, ceramics, performance, and the artist’s book. She graduated in architecture from the University of Ljubljana, a background that informs her spatial, material, and conceptual approach to images. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Moderna galerija, the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova and National Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Gagosian Gallery in Paris, Beverly Hills and New York, and many others. She has received a number of awards: the Bronze Award at the Nanjing International Art Festival in China, the International Ceramics Triennial Unicom of Ljubljana, and the Rihard Jakopic award. In ten years, Tanja Lazetic has published over twenty works. Her photobooks are now part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Tate in London and Bibliothèque Kandinsky in Paris. She lives and works in Ljubljana.