Exhibitions

Black Photography

Group photographic exhibition Karlinia Exhibition Venue (JSKD) 12–30 September 2026

Since the first exhibitions of the Maribor Circle in the early 1970s, the world has changed profoundly. Today, photographs from that era read as distinctly existential images of people and space. They were created at a time when direct criticism of society was often impossible, so photographers expressed their views indirectly—through the atmosphere of events, the symbolism of motifs, and seemingly everyday scenes. The cinematic language of the period also had a strong influence, especially the European New Wave, whose poetics shaped many artists.

We live in a different world today. At first glance, we have greater freedom of expression, yet every day we are surrounded by an unimaginable volume of images and information that shapes our view of reality. For this very reason, photography is once again becoming an important space for a personal perspective: an opportunity to pause for a moment and observe the world differently.

We are particularly pleased that so many women photographers are among this year’s selected artists. While their presence in history was often overlooked or pushed into the background, today they make an important contribution to the contemporary photographic landscape through their work. Their strong representation in the exhibition is not the result of a desire for gender balance, but of the quality of the selected photographs.

A great diversity of artistic approaches is also evident. While the Maribor Circle operated as a closely connected creative group with a recognisable shared poetics, today’s artists each bring their own perspective, experience and visual language. Perhaps this diversity best reflects the time in which we live—a time without uniform answers, but with many different viewpoints.

Rudi Uran

Dražen Tirić: My Black-and-White World

University Library Maribor – Avla Exhibition Space 12–30 September 2026

Dražen Tirić from Bjelovar is a traveller, entrepreneur and photographer whose artistic path began developing more intensively in 2012, when he became a member of Fotoklub Zagreb and enrolled in its photography school. His work was recognised early on in the club’s photographic competitions, where he received numerous awards, including several first prizes for Collection of the Year and Photograph of the Year.

His dedicated work and distinctive artistic approach reached a peak in 2025, when he received major recognition at every competition he entered, confirming his status as one of Fotoklub Zagreb’s most successful members. He stood out especially at the 11th Pannonia Reflections Photography Salon, where he was named the most successful author from Fotoklub Zagreb and received four awards.

Tirić’s photographs have been presented in group exhibitions in Budapest, London, Trieste, Uppsala and Seoul. He has also held nine solo exhibitions in Zagreb, Novska and Bjelovar.

Drawing on a personal passion for travel, Dražen Tirić develops photography as a way of recording encounters, spaces and moments that elude everyday perception. Street photography occupies a special place in his oeuvre, while his creative interests also include portrait, fashion and nude photography.

Tirić’s photographic approach is based on a balance between documentary and artistic practice. He brings subjective interpretation into documentary photography, creating multilayered visual narratives in which the aesthetics of an immediate image intertwine with conceptual meanings. The boundary between objective record and personal experience is deliberately blurred, leaving viewers an active role in interpreting the photograph.

His photographs record not only scenes, but also the full range of human emotion, the intimacy of a moment, social atmosphere and subtle relationships between protagonists. It is in this combination of immediacy and thoughtful artistic articulation that the power of his photography lies, successfully connecting everyday life with artistic reflection.

Fragments of Presence

Media Nox Gallery 9 September–20 October 2026

Photography is a trace of something that was present: a moment, a gaze, a body, a space, an event. Yet every trace is incomplete. It reveals something, conceals something, and much is inevitably lost. Fragments of Presence brings together two photographic series that approach questions of perception, identity and the elusive nature of the photographic image from different directions.

Between the world and the individual, between light and darkness, between what is revealed and what is hidden, images emerge that do not offer definitive answers but instead open up a space for doubt, interpretation and personal experience.

Fragments I

Curiosity. Restlessness. The world is not orderly. It is not symmetrical, not clear, and it rarely reveals its meaning. These photographs emerge through encounters with such a world—full of coincidences, shadows, faces, animals, objects and situations that appear for a moment before disappearing.

The artists are united by an interest in photography as an intuitive response to moments that cannot be explained. This photographic series stems from an interest in photography as an open space of perception, doubt and fragments, where its concepts draw on the legacy of the Japanese Provoke movement. The world in these photographs is not more beautiful, clearer or more understandable. It is merely paused for a moment before dissolving again into noise, movement and darkness.

Fragments II

Memory. Transformation. Uncertainty. A person is not unified. Not finished, not entirely clear, and rarely fully reveals themselves. The images were created through an exploration of such an identity—elusive, multilayered and constantly in the making. Faces, bodies, gazes and figures appear briefly before the lens, then retreat into darkness again.

Black-and-white photography is not merely an aesthetic choice. By reducing the world to light and shadow, it opens a space where what remains unspoken becomes significant. The images do not describe people; they explore the limits of their visibility. The photographs function like frames from a film whose story we never learn.

Artists

The exhibition brings together visual explorations by two generations of photographers from the School for Horticulture and Visual Arts Celje, who use the medium of black-and-white photography to question the dynamics of the contemporary world and humanity’s place within it.

Fragments I was created by secondary-school students mentored by Mitja Zupanc. They are young observers guided primarily by curiosity and restlessness. They do not seek perfection or embellished aesthetics in their environment; instead, they capture raw reality, street noise, coincidences and movement through the lens.

Fragments II was created by higher-education students mentored by Andreja Ravnak. These artists turn from external events inward, towards exploring the human psyche, unresolved identity, memory and the relationship with space.

Maribor Circle

Group exhibition Courtyard of the Regional Archives Maribor

In 1971, a group of members of Fotoklub Maribor staged an exhibition at the then Rotovž exhibition salon in Maribor. They presented photographs of banal, unattractive motifs, transforming them into artworks through a distinctive approach to image composition and deliberate violations of photographic rules.

The artists focused on the expressive possibilities of the photographic medium, using deep greys and blacks, which led to their approach being known as black photography. They determined the motif, framing and composition at the moment of photographing, with no later interventions or cropping in the darkroom. They emphasised this further by printing the entire negative with a black border.

A distinctive feature of the exhibition was that the artists appeared as a unified whole. Individual photographs were not signed; instead, they signed the exhibition as a collective artistic project. This approach departed from the prevailing line of photographic practice at the time and provoked intense reactions among both professional and general audiences.

One of the most radical breaks in Slovenian photography of the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s was made by the so-called Maribor Circle, which first presented itself collectively at an exhibition in the Rotovž Salon in February 1971. The significance of this presentation and the subsequent work of individual authors lies in foregrounding the media autonomy of photographic expression and the relevance of everything visible as a potential subject of the photographic image.

Matej Peljhan: Anatomy of Disappearance

Maribor Photography Museum 10 September–5 October 2026

The exhibition opens up black-and-white photography as a space of tension between the visible and the erased, between presence and disappearance. The images are not based on presenting the world, but on its ruptures—moments in which meaning eludes clear expression.

The series rests on a radical contrast between light and darkness, where light acts as a selective cut into reality. Space is not unified, but broken into illuminated fragments and deep black voids that often occupy most of the frame.

At the heart of the series lies the fragility of existence: a dead bird at the edge of a step, a gaze trapped behind a blurred surface, an individual standing still amid a flow of scattered bodies. These scenes do not function as documents, but as visual fragments of existential experience, in which a person is both observer and participant.

The entire series explores the limits of visibility: how much we can see before the image disappears into darkness, and how much we dare to see at all. The space created by the photographs is ambiguous—at once intimate and alienated. The movement of the crowd erases identity, while individual motifs emphasise vulnerability and invisibility.

An aesthetics of the unbeautiful takes shape as a conscious stance. It is not a search for shock, but a persistence in looking at what we usually overlook. Photography becomes a space for a quiet confrontation with transience, the anonymity of contemporary existence, and the boundary between inward and outward vision.

Miha Kacafura

Osman Demiri: Children of War

Stolp Photo Gallery 12 September–10 October 2026

Everything written or said about the fate of Kosovar refugees is only a drop in the ocean compared with the suffering they endured during displacement and life in refugee camps. Among all those affected, children suffered the most. Their childhood world was turned upside down the moment they were forced onto the path of displacement.

Many of them took their first steps in a camp. In moments of anxiety and sorrow, they represented the only hope and greatest treasure of their families. The purpose of the exhibition is, at least symbolically, to separate scenes of violence from the sincere and innocent lives of children, and to portray childhood as normally as possible in circumstances that were anything but normal.

Osman Demiri is a photographer, filmmaker and university professor from Kumanovo, North Macedonia. Throughout his life, he has explored photography through various subjects, perspectives and technological approaches. He creates documentary and reportage photography, while also achieving strong artistic expression in abstract visual compositions.

Simon Chang: Half Home

1/2 Hometown

University Library Maribor – Art Exhibition Space 10–28 September 2026

Simon Chang is a documentary photographer who has lived and worked in Europe since 2003. His work focuses primarily on stories of people whose voices are rarely heard, marginalised communities, and issues of mental health in post-conflict societies.

After completing his studies at the Department of Communications Arts at Fu Jen University in Taipei, he moved to Prague in 2004, where he was accepted into the master’s programme in photography at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). Since 2010, he has lived and worked in Ljubljana.

His work has been presented in museums, galleries and festivals across Europe and Asia. His most recent photo book, Shepherds and the Slaughterhouse, received the award for Best Designed Book at the Slovenian Book Fair in 2023.

I do not show photographs of my native Taiwan very often. Almost never. I have lived in Europe for more than 20 years. Taiwan has become something in between for me; something that is no longer there, yet has not completely disappeared. Half home.

I miss it in very unexpected ways, especially when I see the sea. That is when homesickness comes. Not exactly for my hometown, but more for a feeling. For a home that does not exist.

When I look at the photographs I took in Taiwan, I feel as if I am looking at scenes from a film. They are memory and fiction at once. I no longer know how real they are. I only know that half of it is the result of longing …

Zoran Kolarić: In Between

In Between

RRRudolf Gallery 12–30 September 2026

When looking at Zoran Kolarić’s photographs, one gets the impression that space interests him more than people. Although he often places a figure within it, that figure never becomes the main protagonist. It tells no story, reveals no psychology and does not seek to evoke empathy. Sometimes the person disappears altogether and only their shadow remains—a trace of something that was there but is no longer important.

For Kolarić, the figure is not the reason the photograph was made. It is primarily a reference, almost an orientation point, suggesting what kind of space we are looking at and what function it might have. Yet in the very next moment, this function dissolves. The person becomes part of the mise-en-scène, one of the elements in the construction of silence and emptiness that the artist carefully builds.

His figures seem as though they want to leave the space. They do not inhabit or conquer it. They leave behind not a story, but the sense that the space exists independently of them and will continue to exist after their departure.

The photographs may be understood as a personal visual diary: not as a document of space, but as a record of a relationship with the world. Each frame is a quiet self-reflection, a record of one’s own otherness and distance from the world surrounding the artist. These spaces are therefore not merely architecture or landscape; they become mental spaces—timeless and open.

Rudi Uran