Opening of the international group exhibition Earth Gazes Back II at Monfort Gallery in Portorož
The exhibition Earth Gazes Back II is part of the international project More-than-Planet, which opens up space for reflection on how we perceive, represent and understand our planet today. The exhibition brings together scientific observation, artistic research, local knowledge and technological systems of perception, raising the question of how to develop environmental literacy and understanding at a time when the future is becoming increasingly uncertain. The first version of the exhibition was presented at Gallery Valve in Oulu, Finland, from September 2024 to January 2025.
The exhibition will open at Monfort Gallery in Portorož on Thursday, 2 April 2026, at 7 pm, and will remain on view until 10 June 2026. Presented in the former salt warehouse, the exhibition gains an additional spatial resonance. Monfort is a place of history, materiality and transition; a place where geology, infrastructure, memory and the flows of the world meet. This is precisely why it offers an exceptionally fitting framework for reflecting on a planet that is not a distant abstraction, but a material, political and sensory reality.
The exhibition features works by Baran Caginli, Cesar & Lois, Felicia Honkasalo, Mari Keski-Korsu, Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte, Minna Långström, Antti Tenetz and Spektr Z/Marko Peljhan. Their works bring together remote sensing data, photography, video, installations, artistic research and science in a shared reflection on a world that can no longer be thought of separately from its crises. At the core of the exhibition lies the question of how to think the planet at a time when the boundaries between the natural and the technological, the local and the planetary, are constantly shifting and being reshaped. The exhibition is curated by Taija Jyrkäs, Darja Zitsev, Antti Tenetz and Marko Peljhan (production: Zavod Projekt Atol; co-production: Piran Coastal Galleries, Photo North – Pohjoinen Valokuvakeskus, Northern Photographic Centre Oulu; production team: Marko Gabrijelčič and Ieva Auzina).
Exhibition Piran Coastal Galleries – 50 Years of Contemporary Art at the Piran City Gallery
Accompanying program
Piran Coastal Galleries are marking the 50th anniversary of their work with an exhibition of documentary material that takes visitors through half a century of activity in the field of contemporary art on the local, national and international levels. The exhibition includes promotional, documentary, book and other archival material: posters, exhibition catalogues, leaflets, invitations, other publications and printed matter.
In the coming months, alongside the exhibition, we will continue with a series of dynamic conversations with guests who have contributed in various ways to the development of Piran Coastal Galleries or who have followed this development as part of the professional and broader interested public. The conversations will be recorded in order to establish an archive of moving memories, intended both for the local community and for the wider public for study and research purposes.
In the month of April, we will invite designers who have worked or are still working on printed materials and other publications of Piran Coastal Galleries. Among them, the documentary exhibition will certainly highlight Vojko Tominc, a long-time designer of invitations, posters, and catalogues for some of the most prominent and widely acclaimed PCG exhibitions in the 1990s. Darja Vuga has designed various printed materials mainly since 2000, among which the magazine Gledga stands out. Duška Đukič has been designing various printed materials and PCG catalogues since 2006 and has been employed at PCG since 2017. The discussion will be moderated by PCG curator Tatjana Sirk and will take place at the Piran Civic Gallery; the exact date will be announced at a later time.
Creative Easter workshops at the Herman Pečarič Gallery in Piran
Before the Easter holidays, we have prepared two engaging creative workshops for children.
The first, entitled Surprise Easter Eggs, will take place on Friday, 3 April 2026, from 4 pm to 6 pm, and will be led by art educator Vasko Vidmar. The workshop will focus on drawing Easter motifs using an interesting technique of drawing on folded paper. When the sheets are opened, various figures appear, in this case Easter animals (e.g. bunnies, chicks…). In this way, children will become familiar with the basic techniques of animating simple figures.
The second workshop, entitled The Colourful Underwater World, will take place on Saturday, 4 April 2026, from 11 am to 1 pm, and will be led by art educator and artist Rihard Lobenwein. Using watercolours, children will create an underwater world motif with fish. They will explore the principle of negative painting, in which the motifs themselves are not painted, but rather the space around them. By layering colours, they will create a sense of depth and the movement of water while developing their creativity and visual expression.
International student workshop Erasmus+ BIP: Rethinking Piran
From 20 to 24 April 2026, an international architectural and urban planning workshop (Erasmus+ BIP) entitled Rethinking Piran: The Architectural and Urban Identity of the Street will take place in Piran. Students of architecture and urbanism will explore streets according to the guidelines of the New European Bauhaus (NEB): aesthetics, sustainability and inclusion. They will work in international groups and use various working methods, such as literature review, photography, interviews, measurements, drawings and visualisations.
The project partners, in which Piran Coastal Galleries also participate, are the University of Ljubljana, the University of Split and La Salle-Ramon Llull University (Spain). The Rethinking Piran workshop is part of a series of workshops including Rethinking Islands (Korčula, 2025) and Rethinking Barcelona (planned for 2027).
