Ceramics by artists from 30 countries are on display at Slovenia's National Museum in a juried exhibition that provides an insight into the new and diverse ways in which this medium is being explored today.

Artists from around the globe have been invited to send in their works and an international jury selected 64 from among 319 entries to showcase at the 5th International Ceramics Triennial UNICUM 2023.

The selected works are exceptionally diverse, combining video, performance, photography, sculpture, painting and printmaking, Zora Žbontar, one of the heads of the project, said at the opening on 15 May.

The jurors awarded the main UNICUM prize to Dmitrij Bulawka-Fankidejski, a Ukrainian-born artist living in Poland, for his stonework in the ceramic oxide technique, which he named Excerpt.

Irene Biolchini, the jury's head, described the work as challenging and intriguing. "If you get close to the piece, it vibrates with a potential gold suggestion. It looks like a stone, but it's not," she told TV Slovenija.

Second prize went to Slovenian-based Serbian artist Veljko Zejak for Ghost Cities in clay, a printmaking technique that he developed himself.

The third, honorary prize went to Serbian artist Velimir Vukićević for his work The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Catherine Sanke from Germany was honoured as an up-and-coming artist for paper porcelain in a wooden card file box, titled In Night and Ice.

The winnning and other selected works are on show at the National Museum in the centre of Ljubljana, with four other exhibitions at the museum's location in Metelkova Street rounding off the event called Ceramics Today. They all run until the end of September.

ITALY is the project in which Alberto Gianfreda invited craftsmen from all over Italy to contribute traditional ceramic ornaments, which he  broke and reconstructed to create a new sculpture. He recorded the destruction process to create a series of NFTs.

Table for Two is an exhibition in which Slovenian artist Tanja Lažetić reinterprets the National Museum's ceramics collection, while ceramics meets wood in an exhibition by Igor Ravbar, a restoration specialist.

Also on display is an international exhibition of ceramics by students of art schools from Slovenia and Serbia.