Having finished her undergraduate studies of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, in 2014, Šuligoj is currently enrolled in the postgraduate photography course at the Aalto University in Finland.
Graduating from the Arts Gymnasium in Nova Gorica, where she specialized in theatre, she studied journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Inside these two institutions an important nucleus of her personal interest was formed – one which she tries to articulate today through photography – theatre, as the concept of re-creation through performance and assuming someone else’s identity, and social sciences as scientific research of actual activities of individuals and groups. Through her study of photography, these two outlooks join hands in the quest for answers to age-old yet still relevant questions of the origins, limits and ends of an identity – what defines us as individuals, what are the outer limits of social constructs, what and how big is the contribution of one’s character as the “spice” of every individual, and what does our physical body have in common with all that?
In her graduation series Undefined (2014), which represents a radical cleansing of social conventions, the artist focuses solely on the material part of a human being, the corpus nudum. But because our bodies are more than full of individual traces, Šuligoj completely covers her portraitees with a white sheet, thus reducing them to a common denominator. Through variations in gestures she then observes the quantities of identity coming through the drapery. Her photographs explore what it means to be an individual, and how much of an indicator of what’s inside is the outside, claiming that even posture is enough to delineate an individual’s identity.