With just 280,000 inhabitants – less than a quarter of the population of Prague – Ljubljana is one of the EU’s smaller capital cities, but the Slovenian metropolis has always thought big. And on 26 November, with the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, it will throw its hat into the ring to establish itself as one of Europe’s major art centres.

This museum, in the trendy Metelkova district, marks a splitting off from the city’s Moderna galerija or Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1947 with a show of Soviet Realists (construction started in 1941 and was halted by the Second World War). That museum, itself spun off from the city’s venerable National Gallery, will remain the home of 20th-century modernist art prior to 1960.

The Slovenes have seen regimes come and go; they’ve been ruled by the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. While the new museum will offer a permanent home to Slovenia’s Arteast 2000+ Collection of Eastern European art, most of its natives identify not with Eastern Europe but with the West – not surprising, considering it takes just three hours to drive north from Trieste, Italy all the way through the country to Graz, Austria.

A great deal of the work in Arteast 2000+ is about another kind of travel – the “joy of travelling to the West” – according to Zdenka Badovinac, museum director and the collection’s curator. Ljubljana is truly where Eastern and Western Europe meet.

Slovenia has been independent for 20 years, after a war that lasted only 10 days – because, Slovenes say, the Eastern European Yugoslavians didn’t care much about a Western European nation state with few Serb inhabitants. Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and changed its currency from the tolar to the euro in 2007. While priding itself on its ancient heritage (the impressive castle, its scenic medieval lanes), the city also prides itself on its fresh, contemporary outlook (helped by the presence of 50,000 students, plus cutting edge designers and graphic artists).

The new, minimalist museum building is a distillation of modern Slovene style. Known as White Box, it was winning urban and architectural design prizes as far back as 2001, when it was only a set of schematics developed by the local Groleger Arhitekti firm, whose first challenge was working with the protected historic structure, a 19th-century army barracks.

That barracks was, for many years, one of the world’s most famous squats, and a cultural centre that spread to influence surrounding blocks. When developers took over the main edifice for the museum, they were careful to retain the flavour of what’s called ‘Metelkova City’, a zone of clubs, galleries and hipster shops smack in the middle of town.

“Metelkova is now the museum quarter, but it’s composed in an interesting and unexpected way. This is very Slovene,” says Badovinac. “You can have the most experimental environment next to major institutions. And as an institution, we can do radical things. We’re not under the same constraints, and we can still experiment.”

Described by its creators as “a hollow sculpture with a dynamic character”, the 4,500m2 space is all about whiteness, light and openness. It will display the Arteast 2000+ collections and stage exhibitions of post-1960s works. The opening show Museum of Affects is a result of Ljubljana’s collaboration with Antwerp’s M HKA, Barcelona’s MACBA and Eindhoven’s Von Abbemuseum in the long-term research project and network L’Internationale.

Slovenian artists have long been know to art connoisseurs, who are familiar with Slovene Impressionism. They include 50s abstract artists such as Riko Debenjak, whose work is displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and stained-glass artist Stane Kregar; 70s modernist painter Tomo Podgornik and Andraž Šalamun, known for crafting installations from ‘poor’

materials such as plaster and iron; and IRWIN, a contemporary group of six artists and one of the core components of art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). The movement, which defines itself as “retrograde”, has issued ‘passports’ as part of its art philosophy: these made the news by being sold as genuine by unscrupulous scammers in Nigeria and Egypt. You don’t get more postmodern than that.

Slovenia’s approach to display is fitting for a country that spent most of its existence being invaded and ruled by others, concentrating on what could be its own role as an onlooker to – and now, at last, a participant in – its own life. In the catalogue for the original Arteast 2000+ launch, Badovinac mused about the questions raised by the exhibition. “When is a work of art really finished?” she asked. “Who finishes a work of art? An artist, curator, or viewer?”

Ten years later, White Box is expanding that approach, according to the Groleger Arhitekti team. It notes: “The key purpose of the idea was not the artwork itself but the observer and his reaction towards art placed in a public space in which he enters a scene of a play, a stage, where the variability results in new experiences and aspects of viewing.”

Travel writers often fetch up the old chestnut that Ljubljana is a ‘Little Prague’, but its embrace of the contemporary makes it more akin to its partner in art, Antwerp – where the contemporary museum is a former corn silo and an old garage has been converted into the main city library – than to the timeless Czech capital.

Creative, innovative Slovenia was the most prosperous of all the republics comprising Yugoslavia. Now it’s poised to become the most culturally successful of the former Yugoslavian nations as well.