Gregor Božič: Fruits Dreamed of by Farmers in Winter Time

An exhibition of photographs by Gregor Božič, photographer, film director and ECoC Ambassador.

In cooperation with the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica - Gorizia, the French Institute in Slovenia and MUba Eugène Leroy, The Carinthian Gallery of Fine Arts has organised the exhibition Fruits as Dreamed of by Farmers in Winter Time. It is an adaptation of an exhibition that took place from September 2024 to February 2025 at the French museum MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing. The exhibition will be officially opened by the ECoC Programme Director Stojan Pelko, on Friday 11 April 2025 at 18:00. The curator of the exhibition is Bénédicte Duvernay (MUba Eugène Leroy).

The exhibition will focus on photographs by Gregor Božič, a photographer and filmmaker from Nova Gorica (director of the award-winning film Zgodbe iz kostanjevih gozdov, director of photography of the Oscar-nominated and Palme d'Or winning film The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent), who is presenting his first solo exhibition in Slovenia. Božič's works will be featured alongside artworks from the collections of KGLU and other Slovenian museums and galleries. The exhibition illustrates the interplay of natural and cultural landscapes and the conflict between nature and human rationalisation of the environment, while expressing a renewed desire to restore balance.

Božič's photographic works highlight the disappearance of indigenous fruit varieties and associated cultural heritage, which he has documented in the few parts of Europe where traditional production methods still exist. The photographs encourage reflection on the impact of old fruit trees on the cultivated landscape, on our understanding of it, and on their aesthetic and narrative impact in the minds of local people.

The exhibition opens up broader reflections on landscape as a cultural construct, which until recently was the result of a daily negotiation between man and space—shaped by local communities and natural conditions. In recent decades, the rationalisation of agricultural production, the extensive use of land and the globalisation of agrarian practices have gradually erased indigenous landscapes, along with the knowledge, traditions and people who co-created them. The countryside is being mapped out in a single visual code: the same crops, the same tools, the same interventions in space—and the former diversity is giving way to utilitarianism.