Ibra Ibrahimovič: Shards of Northern Bohemia
We invite you to the final stop of the traveling exhibition featuring selected photographs by legendary documentary photographer Ibra Ibrahimović, which captures the raw reality of the North Bohemian brown coal mining region at the turn of the millennium. Through eight powerful black-and-white images, you’ll gain insight into two worlds that inevitably collided in North Bohemia.
The exhibition is divided into two closely interconnected sections. The first section documents industrial monuments and their demise. The images of giant excavators in the Nástup and Čepirohy mines, along with the subsequent documentation of the dismantling of the KU 800 machine in Chabařovice, are not merely technical records; they symbolize the end of an era.
The second, more intimate section of the exhibition focuses on the story of the village of Libkovice—the last settlement that had to give way to mining. Through the photographs, we follow the fate of Mr. Karel Krejčí, one of the last residents who refused to leave his home. The images capturing his face against the backdrop of vanishing streets and houses are a profound study of uprootedness.
Ibra Ibrahimović documented the “shards” of an era, but their edges remain sharp even today—it’s not just about disappearing villages, but about a profound climate crisis driven primarily by the fossil fuel industry. Northern Bohemia is currently in the process of finding a new path forward without coal. Ibra’s photographs remind us that the scars on the landscape and in people’s lives heal slowly, and that the price we pay for energy self-sufficiency has both historical and future repercussions.
This exhibition is conceived as a traveling project that connects key locations in the North Bohemian region with the capital. The journey of the works along the Ústí–Most–Chomutov–Prague axis symbolically traces the path of coal-fired energy and brings the debate over its cost back to where these stories began.
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