The photography curator Lara Štrumej, MA, presents a photo by Klavdij Sluban, Ukraine (1998), from his series Around the Black Sea – Winter Travels.

“Klavdij Sluban’s contemplative travels in countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain, where this photograph was also taken, are marked by his reflections about life on the margins – either social, political or geographical. To Sluban, born in Paris to Slovenian parents and ‘torn’ between two different worlds – the Slavic and the Latin – all these countries, not only former socialist ones, reveal themselves as societies of fallen utopias. Be it the Balkans, Israel, Japan, the Antilles or juvenile detention centers in France, the Soviet Union, Slovenia or wherever his creative push led him, Sluban’s figures always inhabit a dreary world, full of existential anxiety. Closer as these figures are to a mirage than mere reality, they embody the photographer’s own sentiment of living on the margin. Or as Sluban says in his poem ex… ‘extirpated excommunicated expropriated expatriated’.”