NONUMENT GROUP
ABOUT + CV
METHODOLOGY
FIELD EVENTS
BOOK
NONUMENT GROUP is a research and art collective that deals with processes of remembering and oblivion in space. Their activities include research on nonuments – architecture, monuments, public spaces, infrastructure – whose meaning has transformed as a result of social or political changes. In the process, the group has established a register of nonuments, organized field events, and explored diverse strategies to create artistic interventions that interrogate the meaning of heritage in space through theexperience of the present.The Nonument Group is formed by Neja Tomšič, Martin Bricelj Baraga, Nika Grabar and Miloš Kosec. In their projects, they collaborate internationally with a number of co-creators, researchers and artists.
www.nonument.org
https://www.instagram.com/nonument/
NONUMENT01: McKELDIN FOUNTAIN, 2017.
Lisa Moren and Jaimes Mayhew with Neja Tomšič and Martin Bricelj Baraga.
Gallery Installation: 2-channel video installation, 3d printed model, text, 2017
Public Space Intervention: Augmented Reality App for tablets and smartphones, 2017
The Nonument Group’s first intervention took place in the United States, when a Designated Free Speech Zone and one of the few public spaces in downtown Baltimore, the McKeldin Fountain, was earmarked for demolition. The group organised a performative walk, a workshop and a draw-a-thon led by Fred Scharmen during which we measured the fountain to be able to recreate it in virtual space.
After the fountain was demolished in 2016, the Nonument Group with Lisa Moren developed an
award-winning Augmented Reality app, a virtual memorial to the lost fountain: Nonument01: The
McKeldin Fountain. The app is a virtual walk-in reconstruction of the fountain in life size. Walkers are
able to experience the fountain, and while walking they encounter testimonies and memories of
Baltimoreans that frequented and used the fountain as a public space.
PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS:
Creative Time Summit, New York City, NYC. Oct 2019.
Concourse Gallery, Rockville, MD. Sep 4 - Oct 20, 2019.
City Museum, Ljubljana. February 2018.
ISEA 2018, Durban Art Gallery, Durban, JAR. June 2018.
FROM NOWHERE TO NOPLACE.
THE PIONEER RAILWAY, 2019.
Performative soundwalk: sound composition, light installations, three performers, 22”, 2019.
Gallery installation: Single Channel Video, 6 framed photographs, two flags, archive table: 2 prints on wood: 200 cm x 120 cm, 2019.
Single-channel video, 22”, 2020.
The Pioneer Railway was a 5 kilometres long railway on the then outskirts of Ljubljana. It operated between 1948 and 1954 and was entirely run by children, aged 7 to 14. Although it was visited by tens of thousands of people, it was, after it was dismantled, almost completely erased from collective memory.
The former pioneer railway is today a scenic bicycle lane. The memory of the railway is preserved through individual efforts and through the memories of the former pioneer railway children.
From Nowhere to Noplace addresses themes of memory and erasure in relation to infrastructureand ideology. It takes the shape of a performative light and sound walk during the night on the ghostly former tracks of the Pioneer Railway. Walkers were invited to take a collective guided walk while listening to a sound essay that merges documentary sounds, excerpts of interviews with former pioneers and experts, and a narrated soundscape. Three performers – futuristic pioneers that guided the tour, performed symbolic choreographies to mark the decisive points in the railway’s life: VISION / OPENING / WORK / DECLINE. Each chapter had a different light- scape atmosphere. The procession concluded with the burning of four words: FUTURE, BODOČNOST, NOWHERE, NO PLACE.
FROM NOWHERE TO NOPLACE, THE PIONEER RAILWAY, 2020.
Video essay, 22’
“If you took the railway, you ended up nowhere, you couldn’t do anything there. Well, you could sit in
the waiting room, there were benches there. Or you took a walk on the field,” remembers one of the
pioneers, unknowingly commenting on trust in technology and the joy of travel in and of itself.
“The Pioneer Railway was built for the bright future. Standing in that future, now the present, the Nonument Group's video essay seamlessly shifts from its past (the actual of the archive), to its present erasure and extends to its possible futures. It is one of the possible attempts to explore the possible future at the intersection between an open archive and an experience of different contemporaneities.”
(from Nika Grabar’s text Will today really become yesterday’s tomorrow?)
PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS:
Displacements and Torrents – Where Elbe and Dnipro meet, curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Sasha Baydal, Galerie Cité internationale des arts, Paris,France, Oct-Jan 2024.
Things break down, MSUM - Museum of contemporary art, Ljubljana. Curated by Ana Mizerit. June 2023 - June 2024.
An archive of what will be, 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Cukrarna, Ljubljana. Sep 2023 - January 2024.
From Nowhere to Noplace, Pioneer Railway and Buzludzha. Dnipro Cultural Center. Construction Festival, Dnipro, June 2021.
Empathy (re)loaded. Curated by Robertina Šebjanič and Alenka Trebušak. Speculum Artium festival,
Trbovlje, October 2020.
From Nowhere to Noplace: Pioneer Railway. Exhibition at the Historical Atrium of the Municipality of
Ljubljana, May - July 2020.
From Nowhere to Noplace: Pioneer Railway. Performative soundwalk at the former tracks of the
Pioneer Railway, Lighting Guerrilla festival, 25 May 2020.
DEUTSCHE MARKEN (in faithful hands), 2020.
Installation (hologram, video loop 1’54”), 2020
The installation “Deutsche Marken'' by the Nonument Group addresses collective memory as well as
collective oblivion of the economic transition of the former DDR in 1989-1994. The economic carriers
of identity – the products, factory emblems and industrial labels were transformed into an asset for privatisation and optimisation. In parallel, a similar unequal exchange was debated around the monetary union between the East and the West. The installation introduces the main carrier of this transition – the 1990 German Mark – that gets manipulated with the images of the production facilities transformed, developed as well as liquidated by the transitional Treuhand fund. In this synthesis, the mostly hidden and behind-the-scenes privatisation process spearheaded by the Treuhand fund is given a tangible and polemical form that brings back to life the names and facades of the liquidated factories. The magic tricks with the coins in the background – isn’t the fiat monetary system based purely on trust? – is the stimulus for gathering the individual views, memories and statements of this rarely addressed collective process of an often traumatic transition. Deutschmark, the stable currency of West Germany, was one of the central elements of Western economic propaganda as well as the basis of monetary union between East and West Germany in 1990. West Germany's currency was also the unofficial savings currency of much of Central and Eastern Europe in the period of transition between socialist and capitalist societies. Its last »surviving« remnant is the Bosnian Mark, still in use in this former Yugoslav republic almost twenty years after Deutschmark itself ceased to exist. Nonument Group from Slovenia, another former Yugoslav republic, chose to work with this powerful economic and political symbol to address the controversial economic, social and symbolic cost of transition for the East German society.
TGH-48: NOTHING CAN HAPPEN HERE, 2021.
Performative sound drive, sound composition, 3 performers, 3 taxi drivers, 20', 2021.
Video, 20’, 2025.
Savin Sever’s parking garage, one of his masterpieces, is characterised by a distinct duality: it is a revered example of modernist architecture of the 1960s and at the same time a neglected and “useless” building. With a sonic drive through the garage, the Nonument Group drew attention to the specific structure of the building, which is not only architecturally fascinating, but, even in its supposedly problematic present existence, full of vitality and individual improvisations. Through an open reading, the structure already offers the changing city around it a platform for renewed, technologically up-to-date, socially engaged and city-forming content.
PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS:
Picture (a) City, Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2025. Curated by Igor Španjol. On the way to... Cukrarna. Ljubljana, 2022. Curated by Alenka Gregorič.
CIRCLE, 2022.
Performative essay and installation
Exhibition: 8-channel sound composition, 7 sculptures, 2022
Performance: performance, 55’, 7 sculptures, 2022
Commissioned by Bunker, Ljubljana; CCCluj, Cluj; Teatro Dimora, Mondaino.
The Circle is a documentary performance that explores temporal layers in the materiality of public parks - ruins, and particularly the remnants of imagined futures that are layered in their soils – material relics, and how they are stored in the imagination and memories of people and other beings. The starting question of the Circle was: what do shared public spaces such as playgrounds, parks, gardens, community spaces say about the social organisation of work and how do they construct and shape narratives of happiness?
The project focuses on a concrete plot of land in Cluj in Romania, which for a certain period in history, came to be known as the Railway Workers' Park. This park was, at a certain period, a community space. Its origins go back to the industrialisation period, when the concept of leisure also emerged. This park became a place in which working-class and leisure cultures symbolically merged. It then was subject to processes of neglect which transformed it into a valuable plot of land. It is now at the point of renovation and complete erasure of its history.
The Circle is an 8-channel audio documentary installation with sculptures made from materials salvaged from construction sites. They are interpretations of poetic writings, linked to the specific locations we explored. The installation can be activated with a storytelling performance.
PREVIOUS PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS:
Mladi levi festival, Cukrarna, August 2022
Casa Tranzit, November 2022
Stara elektrarna, January 2023
ŠKUC Gallery, January 2023
Kunstraum Innsbruck, July 2023, Innsbruck
Crossings festival, May 2023, Maribor
Drugajanje festival, Narodni dom, Celje, 14 nov 2023
Alcobaça, Portugal, Oct 2024.
Pogon, Zagreb, February 2025.
EXIT THROUGH THE WHITE CUBE, 2024.
With their latest intervention at the U3 in one of the central venues of the institutional culturalinfrastructure and its controlled exhibition space –the Museum of Modern Art– Nonument Group (NG) presents their actions and at the same time a reflection on the meaning of the place of exhibition. Thecentral element of the intervention is a white cube as an emblem of an ideal exhibition space as well asa symbol of Western modernism's ideological field. Different types of NG's activities, such as establishinga register, field markings and events, artistic interventions (which will be introduced also at the triennalescreening) are presented surrounding the cube. Through the experience of the exhibition, the whitecube emerges as a backdrop as it is made up of three sides only. However, it also takes on a newmeaning as a space of articulation between the inside and the outside of the museum. In the emptinessof the ideological field of a conflicted contemporaneity NG therefore highlights the importance of therelationship between the art world and the outside world through the medium of physical space as key for the exploration of sensual, emotional, rational and communal form. The White Cube is thus open.
THE EXHIBITION IS OUTDOORS, 2021.
Solo exhibition at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana
5 videos, sound ambience, wooden constructions, prints.
25 May —25 July 2021
The Exhibition is Outdoors served as an introduction to the work of the art and research group by showcasing the database of nonuments and staged art interventions, as well as field events. With their analysis of the historical context, field markings and/or art interventions, the Nonument Group interweave the spaces of the past and the future, everyday spaces and spaces of art. The exhibition layout, which intends to present their work method in three sections, also poses various questions: the unfinished database opens up the question of archive, art interventions are displayed as mere fragments of the staged work, and the upcoming markings of nonuments out there are linked to events that will take place outside the museum during the exhibition, with the documentary material to be added later on. The exhibition layout thus remains an unfinished whole that is constantly being added to, and – crucially – directs the attention to the field, outside of museum space.
The Exhibition is Outdoors thus shed light on the nonument phenomenon from three different angles and by providing a multi-layered experience opened up the question of the possibility to perceive different dislocated events and time fractures in parallel, as well as utilizes space to explore the dividing lines between architecture, art, memory and heritage, which are difficult to pin down.
The central part of the museum exhibition where there field events:
● on June 23 the project Nothing can happen here, a sound drive in the Sever car park, as part of the events prior to opening Cukrarna, the new space for contemporary art;
● on June 29 the intervention at the remains of the Bloudek Tower, the nonument at Šišenski hill on July 23 with the closing event at the Belvedere Vila Bled pavilion.