The exhibition Unadapted Observers. Outsiders and Outlaws hosted at the Central European House of Photography in Bratislava.

18. 2. – 29. 3. 2026

Participating artists: Andrzej Baturo, Vladimír Birgus, Jindřich Štreit, Tone Stojko, Stane Jagodič, Rudolf Sikora, János Szász, Gábor Kerekes, Ladislav Postupa and Bálint Szombathy.

After it’s premiere at the Photon Gallery in Ljubljana in December 2024, the exhibition will be hosted in Bratislava. The exhibition project presents ten important artists – protagonists of the development of specific authorial practices in photography in Central and Eastern Europe in the period before 1990, mainly from the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and Poland.

These are artists who, for various reasons, stood out from the dominant currents of photographic production in the former socialist countries. The first group presents authors who created mainly within the framework of social documentary, but the themes and motifs of their photographs at some point became problematic for the authorities of the time. The second group includes artists who, since the late 1960s, have primarily explored the possibilities of creative expression in the photographic medium.

On the one hand, these were artists who “used photography”, and on the other hand, photographers who consciously moved away from the dominant aesthetics of documentary. The presented authors prove that in this part of Europe there is an exceptional heritage of post-war modernist photography, which is still (too) little known in the wider global and European context.

Exhibition curator: Dejan Sluga

You can read more about the exhibition here.