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Exhibition Cheers! So she goes by the artist Karlo Štefanek opens on March 31, 2026 at 7 p.m. in the Gallery Miroslav Kraljević in Zagreb (Pavla Šubića 29) and will remain open until April 4, 2026.
Starting from the experience of everyday interactions on social networks, the works in the exhibition question the way digital platforms produce a sense of constant communication while simultaneously making it difficult to imagine a real meeting. As curator Leopold Rupnik notes, although social networks were created as a networking infrastructure, “the apparent connection that digital platforms paradoxically offer us results in an even greater feeling of social isolation“.
Referring to the concept of non-place by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, Štefanek transforms the space into a cafe – a place that in Balkan culture traditionally signifies a space of slow conversations and social closeness. In the installation Café Nonplace (2026), the space is reshaped according to the logic of digital platforms. Tables and chairs are arranged in the gallery, while television screens display the artist sitting at a table in various environments – on the beach, in the forest, on a busy street, in the metro, or in a studio, where his body is animated like an emoji reaction. Although the spaces change, the gesture of sitting at the table remains the same, while the conversation is never fully realized. The space of the café thus begins to function as a digital interface in which presence takes place through mediated and incomplete exchanges.
This logic continues in the performance Just Ask (Prijatna kafica) (2026). At the opening of the exhibition, the artist will address the audience in the Zagreb gallery live via TikTok broadcast from his studio in Amsterdam, taking on an anonymous online identity and inviting visitors to communicate through chat. Interaction here takes place mediated, through comments, reactions and digital symbols, maintaining the distance characteristic of online spaces.
The video installation Cheers! So she goes (2026) reinterprets the recognizable gesture of the mirror selfie. Starting from a single self-portrait taken in a mirror, the artist uses artificial intelligence to generate a series of variations of the same scene that constantly return to the starting position, creating an infinite loop of self-referential imagery. The textual layer of the work is composed of fragments of Internet slang and casual expressions collected from real café conversations, which appear like a social network feed and reproduce the rhythm of digitally mediated speech.
The sense of digital overload is further developed in the audio work Archie, don’t cry (2026), composed of fragments of TikTok videos collected during a process of infinite scrolling. From isolated words and short phrases, a narrative gradually emerges that is revealed as a letter of termination addressed to an entity named Archie, an artificial intelligence model. An intimate act of emotional address thus emerges from the voices of strangers whose original contexts have been removed.
Through installations, video works, performance and sound intervention, the exhibition ‘Cheers! So she goes‘ maps the state of contemporary communication in which the boundaries between private and public, human and algorithmic, are gradually erased. In this process, digital spaces, which once functioned as places of creation of alternative identities and communities, are increasingly showing themselves as infrastructures that produce new forms distancing and surveillance.
The exhibition is part of the qEXHIBITION program of the Split collective queerANarchive, and Štefanek’s exhibition is the first edition of that program in Zagreb. The project is realized in cooperation with Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, with the support of the City of Zagreb.
