Ljubljana’s new Bullshit Museum explores the irreverent, often antagonistic humour associated with the former Yugoslavia, using jokes, mannequins and AI-generated images to reflect a shared cultural inheritance. Its founder, Borut Kokelj, argues that the region’s “no filter” humour offers a way of coping with insecurity, unemployment and unresolved tensions, making the museum both comic and culturally reflective.

Opened in May in Ljubljana’s Old Town, the five-room museum takes its name and tone from “yebiga”, a phrase roughly meaning “fuck it” or “screw it”. Although marketed as a museum of Balkan humour, it focuses chiefly on Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, whose identities diverged sharply after Yugoslavia’s collapse and the wars of the early 1990s. Displays address language, religion and conflict, including jokes about Cyrillic and Latin scripts, while acknowledging that exhibiting every regional joke would make the project impossible.