Cankarjev dom, 12.11.2026 - 17.1.2027
The Monsters of Spring project explores the ancient carnival customs of northwestern Slovenia, where some of Europe’s oldest rituals for driving away winter have survived. Originally commissioned by National Geographic, photographer Ciril Jazbec – captivated by the power of these communal rituals – has continued returning to the villages at the foot of the Julian Alps. Every February, festival participants dress as frightening characters symbolising various social roles, reenacting age-old scenes to banish winter and usher in spring. The series documents both portraits of the characters and intimate moments from the ritual itself, in which participants immerse themselves in their masked personas, reviving nearly forgotten traditions. The photographs reveal the bizarre beauty of this festival, combining folk imagination, communal spirit, and the ancient desire to renew the cycle of life.
Galerija Fotografija, 19.11.2026 - 16.1.2027
The photographs in the exhibition Between Ice and Light thus transcend the role of a space where we merely observe captured time. They are a space of memory, a camp of reflection, and a poignant warning. Photography in Greenland is not just an aesthetic image—it is the final witness to a world crumbling before our eyes. It is a silent record of vanishing, millennia-old ice and of the eyes of a nation that refuses to become a mere shadow on its own land.
The exhibition was not created to offer us comfortable admiration of distant beauty; it is an open window into our immediate future and a raw mirror of our own footprint. It reminds us of the single truth of our time: with every crack in the Greenlandic ice, our shared destiny cracks as well. With every disappearing glacier, we are not just losing some remote piece of nature, but irretrievably losing a fragment of our own humanity.
And most importantly—the exhibition does not call for passive pity, but for an active awakening. It urges us to stop viewing the planet as an infinite resource for exploitation and to start living with the awareness that our every decision, every consumer choice, and every political vote echoes all the way to those vulnerable icy shores.
The excerpt is from an exhibition text by Lučka Kajfež Bogataj.
November 10, 2026
