Cleaners by Enej Gala

• Artist talk: Monday 23 February 2026, 4-5pm
• Opening: Monday 23 February 2026, 5.30-7pm
• Opening times: Weekdays 10am-4pm, Tuesday 24 February - Friday 27 March 2026

Cleaners is an ongoing project concerned with maintenance, not as an end point but as a condition, situating acts of cleaning and extraction within a wider ecology of human presence, regulation, and material flow. Combining video and puppetry, the project attends to the ways local environments register, absorb, and occasionally push back against the residues of everyday activity. It started in the artist's studio near Branica river in Slovenia, a NATURA 2000 protected zone where ecological safeguarding exists alongside habitual use, neglect, and slow accumulation.

The work took shape through repeated walks, during which everyday waste is gathered from the natural environment. These are objects that have slipped out of established systems of use and disposal, temporarily removed from circulation and then reintroduced under altered conditions. The act of collecting functions simultaneously as a modest environmental intervention and a form of material research, binding the body to a routine of care that is provisional, partial, and inevitably compromised.

At Black Box the exhibition space becomes a small cinema where puppets assembled from the collected debris are positioned facing a sequence of nine videos. Rather than unfolding as narrative, the videos operate as tutorials or procedural fragments: short, looping sequences that focus on discrete acts of cleaning within tightly constrained frames. The refuse, reconfigured as spectators, occupies an ambiguous role, both witness to and participant in a system that echoes its own cycles of accumulation and removal. Sound structures the installation as much as image. Repetitive, mechanical rhythms generated by movement underscore the sense of labour without culmination, framing maintenance as an ongoing obligation rather than a corrective solution.

By isolating and repeating the gesture of cleaning, Cleaners approaches maintenance as a performative and political practice. Filtered through meticulously crafted marionettes whose forms resist familiar recognition, distinctions between subject and object, care and control, symbol and material begin to erode. What emerges is a closed circuit in which environmental responsibility is enacted, witnessed, and perpetually deferred, an ecosystem maintained not through final repair, but through continuous, obsessive attention.

We would like to thank University for the Creative Arts, Research Office for supporting Black Box Project Space series through Knowledge Exchange funding with the support of Xenia Creative Retreat, Studio Tridol and the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia.

About the Artist

Enej Gala (9.4.1990, Ljubljana) completed his B.A. and M.A. in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and graduated from Royal Academy Schools Postgraduate Programme in London in 2023. In 2014 he participated in an exchange program at the William De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. 

Enej Gala's practice is based on an acute awareness of thinking through making, attempting to grasp the experience of otherness. Puppetry is used as a lens to focus on materials as entities, expanding their potential by exposing and building on their intrinsic qualities. This process questions traditional perspectives on art, craftsmanship, installation, performance and other forms of production. 

For more information images, or interview requests contact Enej Gala: @enejgala | www.enejgala.com