Olja Triaška Stefanović is a visual artist, photographer, and associate professor based in Slovakia. Her artistic research and photographic practice explore the intersections between political history, memory, and visual culture, with a focus on the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement. Working through photography, video, installation, and archival materials, she investigates how symbolic gestures, rituals, and material exchanges—such as hunting diplomacy and floral protocol—functioned as instruments of power, soft diplomacy, and ideological representation.
Her recent bodies of work, The Elephant in Tito’s Menagerie: Animal Diplomacy, Hunting, Exchange, and the Non-Aligned Movement, Patterns of Diplomacy, and Quiet Fronts: Mapping the (In)Visible Cold War, reframe the cultural and ecological dimensions of political alliances and examine the emotional and material residues of the Cold War in the present.
Triaška Stefanović’s work has been exhibited internationally and presented at numerous conferences and symposia, including Documenta in Kassel, where she spoke about hunting and diplomacy within the Non-Aligned Movement. Her exhibitions and talks often bridge artistic and scholarly discourse, situating image-making as both a critical and reflective practice.
She was a Fulbright Fellow in the United States, where she expanded her research on Cold War visual archives, environmental imagery, and the politics of representation. Her Fulbright research continues to inform her current projects, which trace the global entanglements of ideology, aesthetics, and nature across the histories of the Global South and the former Yugoslavia.
Triaška Stefanović teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of Photography and New Media.
