Scene
The duo exhibition BODY. NORM. RESISTANCE. by artists Ines Borovac and Karlo Štefanek, curated by Sabina Oroshi, opened on 18 September 2026 at Gallery NOVO in Pula and remains on view until 23 October 2026. Borovac and Štefanek are multimedia and multidisciplinary artists based in Amsterdam, who both explore identities within their artforms.
BODY. NORM. RESISTANCE. brings together the practices of Borovac and Štefanek around the tension
between the body and the structures that precede it, asking what happens when inherited gestures, symbols and roles are repeated differently enough to expose the instability of the norms they appear to confirm. As Oroshi writes, “For Borovac and Štefanek, closeness to structure is important for understanding resistance. […] To be at the margin, for hooks, means to know the centre without fully belonging to it.”
This position, simultaneously within reach of the centre and excluded from fully inhabiting it, is shared across the practices of both artists. Neither Borovac nor Štefanek approaches the norm from a position of complete exteriority. Instead, their works emerge from a familiarity with the very visual, social and cultural codes they put under pressure. It is precisely this proximity that makes deviation possible. Rather than abandoning these codes, the artists inhabit, repeat and redirect them, allowing the complex mechanisms to become visible in the process. The margin thus functions not simply as a position assigned through exclusion, but as a particular vantage point, one from which the rules of the centre can be recognised closely enough to be manipulated.
Through installations, video works, and performance, BODY. NORM. RESISTANCE. ultimately approaches the norm as something that operates simultaneously on and around the body. Borovac and Štefanek do not propose a body liberated from these systems. Instead, their works remain deliberately entangled with them, re-appropriating and rearranging the codes through which these norms are sustained and, in doing so, finding ways to sneakily escape them.
