Jakopič Gallery presents the largest mid-career retrospective of Klavdij Sluban, one of the world's best-known photographers of Slovenian origin. For Elsewhere Here, the artist and curator Dr Marija Skočir conceived an entirely new selection of series presenting highlights from more than three decades of Sluban's work in over 150 photographs. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive photographic monograph.
Born in Paris to Slovenian parents, Sluban spent his childhood in Livold, near Kočevje, before returning to Paris, where, after studying Anglo-American literature, he taught himself analogue black-and-white photography. This remained his exclusive means of image-making at the time of the exhibition. He began his independent photographic path in 1992 with portraits of Slovenian poets. After witnessing the Balkan war and consciously deciding to work as an artist rather than a documentary photographer, photography became his way of life, combining the poles of his Slovenian-French and nomadic identity.
His work oscillates between the confined spaces of juvenile prisons in France, Eastern Europe, Central America and Latin America, and the vast landscapes encountered on his worldwide travels, characterised by solitude, silence and deep contemplation. He has photographed young people in prisons since 1995, organising photography workshops to share his passion and give them opportunities for creative expression in often desperate environments.
The path from Elsewhere to Here could not have existed without the most important, extensive and extreme journeys, which are the solid path towards the highly individual authorial language that makes Sluban's photography so refined and recognisable. Among these journeys, many coincide in time and place, each representing an entirely new experience, such as his long journeys on the Trans-Siberian, Trans-Mongolian and Tibetan railways, which have already been presented in the East to East and Transsibériades series, as well as his stays in extreme conditions and remote, isolated places such as the Kerguelen Islands.
The distance that most interests him, and that he bridges, is neither geographical nor the distance separating him from his subject, but that between himself and his camera. His way of photographing is impulsive and intuitive, often in motion, without psychological study of the subject. The only sharpness that matters is that of feeling in symbiosis with the gaze that cuts across the scene. Sluban's photographs are landscapes inhabited by all the senses, reflected in the exhibition's contemplative conclusion: an image of a Shinto shrine's torii on Itsukushima Island is complemented by a soundscape conveying a holistic experience of snow and Japan, two of Sluban's most poetic motifs.
Klavdij Sluban exhibits his holistic, ongoing photographic projects at major international festivals, museums and galleries worldwide, often accompanied by superb photobooks and other publications. His works belong to national collections and institutions around the world, and he has received numerous prestigious photography awards.
All photographs were printed using analogue and digital techniques especially for this exhibition as the artist's donation to the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive photographic monograph. The revised and expanded second international edition, containing around 150 works by Sluban, is introduced by a scholarly text by Dr Marija Skočir, the exhibition's curator and the publication's editor.
