KIBLIX 2026 | Sara Bezovšek: Sloptimism

Sara Bezovšek: Sloptimism
6 October–4 November 2026
artKIT

You are cordially invited to the opening of the solo exhibition Sloptimism by intermedia artist Sara Bezovšek, which will take place on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, at 7 p.m. at the artKIT exhibition space.

Sloptimism explores the future of the internet through the phenomenon of AI slop: the mass of generatively created images appearing on our screens, on social media, and increasingly beyond them. Slop is no longer just a recognisable visual style but a mode of automated content production, one that raises numerous ethical, socio-cultural, and ecological questions.

The exhibition focuses on internet folklore, artificially created fantasies, the representation of food, and resistance to AI. The artist investigates how slop spreads, evolves, and spills from digital screens into physical spaces. Sloptimism views this phenomenon with a certain degree of ironic optimism, not so much as something positive, but as a fascination with the grotesque aesthetics of a synthetic future.

Sloptimism begins with the question of what happens when the production of images becomes virtually unlimited, creation becomes affordable, and circulation is automated. In such an environment, the ways images acquire meaning, the extent to which we believe them, and how we relate to them all begin to change. The project traces this process through various expressions of AI slop – from the journey of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, from Indonesian tradition to global meme, commercialization, and political use, to AI-generated images of food that move off screens and affect our trust in images. It continues into increasingly personalized fantasies, from AI-generated dramas and weddings to chatbots and pornography, where questions of intimacy become entangled with questions of consent, exploitation, and control. At the same time, resistance to AI is emerging, only to become caught in the same system of content production and circulation – from protests against data centers to the proliferation of anti-AI content. These examples are therefore not isolated phenomena, but parts of a single process in which the boundaries between image, reality, desire, resistance, and the market grow ever more blurred.

The project is conceived as a website to which new topics will be added over time. The artist is developing it as an evolving archive and an attempt to make sense of a phenomenon that is spreading ever further, across screens and into the physical world.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Ervin Nanc (antimemoria_____), whose work documents and archives rapidly evolving online culture, with particular interest in phenomena that emerge, circulate, and mutate in digital environments. His essay elaborates on the questions raised by the exhibition and situates them within the broader context of internet culture.

Biography

Sara Bezovšek is a new media artist working in the fields of internet art, experimental film and graphic design. Her artistic practice is characterized by reappropriation of online and pop cultural materials. Using a dense visual language of references, she taps into the collective imaginarium and constructs engaging narratives that are both a critique and a celebration of the highly saturated online media landscapes we navigate daily.

She has participated in numerous exhibitions and film screenings worldwide, including venues in Slovenia (Aksioma, Kino Šiška, Ravnikar Gallery Space, MFRU, Osmo/za, DobraVaga, P74, SCCA-Ljubljana, MSUM, BIO, KIBLIX, IZIS), Poland (Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art), Germany (C/O Berlin, panke.gallery), Switzerland (Fotomuseum Winterthur), Austria (viennacontemporary, Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, Discotec), Italy (Fotografia Europea, Metronom, Foto Forum, SPRINT Milano), Spain (MMMAD Festival, Fundación Foto Colectania), Romania (Pharmakon Gallery), Sweden (NSFW/SVILOVA), Serbia (Danube Dialogues Festival), as well as in the Netherlands, Mexico, and online on platforms such as Open Systems (Singapore Art Museum), Are You For Real (ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Feral File and KunstSurfer. Her work has also been featured on platforms such as Do Not Research, Linked Spheres, and ETC magazine, among others.

https://sarabezovsek.com/

In collaboration with Ervin Nanc (antimemoria____).

< screenshot from the website Sloptimism, 2026

artKIT, Glavni trg 14, Maribor
Opening hours: Tuesday–Friday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.