Magdalena Ptiček – NOTHING HERE IS WHOLE - exhibition

3 – 11 July 2026, Galerija SC

The opening of Magdalena Ptiček’s Nothing Here Is Whole , her first solo exhibition, will take place on Friday, 3 July at Galerija SC, starting at 20 h. The exhibition is part of the project Oni dolaze…

The exhibition will be open until 11 July 2026, and can be visited on weekdays from 12 to 20 h and on Saturdays from 10 to 13 h.

From the foreword by Tena Bakšaj:

What does it mean to return to photographs that were never made with the intention of being works of art? What happens when a series of spontaneous, intuitive shots, taken over a long period, becomes the material through which one tries to understand a phase of one’s life? Magdalena Ptiček’s first solo exhibition Nothing Here Is Whole does not necessarily offer reflection in the form of a personal confession. Quite the opposite: it shows that experience always returns in fragments, as a series of random images between which relationships only begin to form afterwards.

Magdalena Ptiček’s photographs were made between 2018 and 2023 as responses to particular inner impulses, without any preconceived whole and without any intention that they would one day be exhibited. They were a way of holding on to a moment that felt important at the time – not because it marked an exceptional event, but because the act of photographing allowed a brief interruption of the inner flow of thought. Photography here is therefore less a means of remembering than a means of orientation: a way of establishing, in a moment of uncertainty, a temporary position from which the world can be looked at again.

Only with the passage of time does it become clear that these photographs do not document events but rather certain patterns of looking. What connects the series is neither the place nor the time of its making, but the affective logic that produced it. The artist is therefore not reconstructing her own past; through this exhibition she maps the way a subject attempts, over time, to establish itself through its own images. Identity here is not a stable fact that precedes the photograph – it comes into being precisely through this continuous process of recording, returning and reconnecting fragments.

The exhibition title „Nothing Here Is Whole“ is not a statement of loss; it describes the way memory and experience work. Wholeness here does not denote something that once existed and then fell apart, but something that always comes about provisionally, out of the relations between separate fragments. This is why the photographs are not arranged chronologically and do not follow the logic of linear narrative. Their arrangement resembles an open structure in which meaning arises not from a single image but from the relations between images, from their repetitions, gaps and unexpected juxtapositions.

The same logic governs the spatial organisation of the exhibition. The photographs occupy only the second half of Galerija SC, while most of the space is deliberately left empty, as an active part of the work. Walking towards the photographs slows perception and changes the rhythm of looking. Visitors therefore do not step straight into the intimate space of the work. They reach it gradually, passing first along the gallery’s white walls, whose emptiness underlines the fragility of the small analogue prints. Once among them, the visitor moves between the photographs, returns to the same motifs, traces their own paths and creates their own constellations. (…)

BIOGRAPHY

Magdalena Ptiček (Varaždin, 1994) is a cinematographer. She graduated in Film and Video Cinematography from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb in 2020. She shoots feature and documentary films as well as television series and commercial formats, and alongside that develops her own independent work, photography included. During her studies she showed work in several group student exhibitions. „Nothing Here Is Whole“ is her first solo exhibition.