The artist Mojca Senegačnik, also known by her pseudonym Mama F, creates collages, illustrations, and embroideries that subtly – through abstract motifs – or more directly, by appropriating imagery from mass media, address contemporary social issues.

She is particularly interested in how social phenomena manifest in the most everyday objects, personal routines, and relationships between people. For her artistic expression, which she understands as a materialization of her thought process on pressing topics, she often employs recycled materials such as cigarette boxes, wrapping paper, newspaper clippings, and similar items, which she uses to create a personal, visual diary-like impressions to make sense of her position in the world. She is drawn to issues such as forms of control over the most intimate habits, such as smoking, which she problematised in her project Burning Desire (2019–2020), where she looked at how pictures change what people decide to do. In her recent production, she used feminist themes and handicrafts, employing embroidery as a technique that preserves an intimate connection with her grandmother, who had the greatest influence on her as a creator. She connects embroidery with the emancipation of women and in this way tells the stories of women, her ancestors, from a time when they were largely without rights and publicly invisible, and only participated in social processes by contributing handicrafts. Domestic and household handicrafts, whether as part of a personal dowry or items made for sale, represented a way to achieve emancipation and empowerment, often serving as a means to support their families. he embroiders their stories on large-format canvases as reduced, minimal textual records or drawings, commemorating the life stories of women from the past or from her own family life. Mojca Senegačnik also understands her artistic practice more broadly, in collective action or through activism. She is active in many collective or community actions and also in organising events outside the gallery space. In this project specifically created for the Likovni Salon, Senegačnik addresses multitasking and hyperproduction, inviting the viewer to slow down and rest. Drawing on her own experience of performing several roles at once, from administrative, artistic to activist, where it seems that there is no respite, and feeling distressed by the current social and political situation, which suggests an acceptance of the normalisation of violence and the constant presence of threat, the artist seeks solace in nature and looks upwards, into the treetops. She photographs them successively and almost obsessively, as if the image of the tree is a residual link with something untouchable, subtle, that transcends the human being. For the artist, the tree is a metaphor for survival and life, a silent witness to the flow of history and an observer of the contemporary. She prints the photographs, taken with her phone, on a textile canvas on which she embroiders verses by the Rhesian poet Silvana Paletti. For her, the slow process of embroidery is the opposite of instantaneous phone photography, and she sees the several hours of slow embroidery as a method of grounding, contemplation and retreat from the noise of the times.

The exhibition at the Likovni Salon is designed as a frieze of sequential photographs and a series of hanging textile prints arranged to allow visitors to walk among them and touch them. The cohesive motif and monochromatic aesthetic create a focused installation, providing a stark contrast to the visual pollution of public spaces.

Mojca Senegačnik (b. 1971) graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Ljubljana. She regularly exhibits her solo projects and participates in group exhibitions. She collaborates with the KunstHaus production at Rogaška Slatina People’s Museum Institute, serving as a co-organiser and co-author of events for the “House on the Hill” project and at the Celje Association of Visual Artists. In the past years, she has worked as a co-organiser of exhibitions and various cultural events, and as a mentor of creative workshops for adults and young people in Komen, Štanjel and Sežana. In 1994, she received the Prešeren Award for students.

Curator: Maja Hodošček
Text: Maja Hodošček

The Celje Regional Museum– Center for Contemporary Arts
Supported by: Municipality of Celje