Klavdij Sluban, East to East, Transsibériades, Mongolia, 2006

20 June – 31 July 2012

Vžigalica Gallery / MGML

After a few years, the French photographer of Slovenian origin will be presented again in Ljubljana in a two-part survey exhibition displaying his extensive cycle East to East. The works were produced on his journeys on the Trans-Siberian railway and on the Baltic Sea coasts. Always analogue, Sluban’s photographs are the results of his long travels to the distant corners of the world. In difficult light conditions characteristic of his works, the analogue technique allows him specific results, such as pronounced haptics and explicit melancholy.

The view through the “Leica” consistently visually articulates the gazes of a “passer-by”. What we see emits a phantom sensation and impalpability, whereas the images are pervaded by a feeling as if the photographer were never actually present at the place where the photo was taken. The onlooker witness moments usually viewed by silent and speechless travellers – trains, ships, lamps or walls – isolated from unnecessary noises made by passers-by. Despite infinite landscapes and the smallness of man within them, the individual scenes are filled with protagonists, be it mountains, chimneys or cats. The relation to these almost always completely static elements on the images creates an exciting story and provides an insight into a totally isolated world far away from mundane profanities, such as production and consumption of material goods. A consistent visual vibration, full of melancholy, timelessness and harmonic black-and-white tones, tells each story separately and simultaneously combines them in a study of individual world views.

The exhibited photos are presented in two techniques. One of them is particularly specific, rarely seen and provides supreme visual delights – it is the “piezography” inkjet print using charcoal pigments, allowing seven different shades of black, which is at the moment the highest quality standard of black-and-white photography. The second technique comprises classic silver-bromide photographs of larger formats produced by wet process.

Klavdij Sluban has won several international awards, including the Niépce Prize (2000), the Leica Prize (2004) and the European Publishers Award for Photography (2009). He has been holding photo workshops with juvenile delinquents in prisons since 1995. He started them in France, at Fleury-Mérogis prison, with the support of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and William Klein, and continued in prisons of East Europe, whilst recently, he has also organised such workshops in Ireland and Central America. He presented works on this subject to the Slovenian public at Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana in 2003.

www.mgml.si

www.sluban.com