Fragments of Northern Bohemia (Ústí nad Labem)

The exhibition is being held at the Hraničář Public Hall in Ústí nad Labem.

What price do we pay for energy self-sufficiency? And what will remain of the landscape and people’s lives once the excavators fall silent?
We invite you to a traveling exhibition of 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 will glimpse two worlds that have inevitably collided in North Bohemia. 

The exhibition is divided into two closely interconnected sections. The first section documents industrial monuments and their demise. Images of giant excavators in the Nástup and Čepirohy mines and the subsequent documentation of the dismantling of the KU 800 machine in Chabařovice are not merely technical records; they are symbols of the end of an era.

The second, more intimate level of the exhibition focuses on the story of the village of Libkovice—the last settlement that had to give way to mining. In 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 is not just about disappearing villages, but about a deep climate crisis driven primarily by the fossil fuel industry. Northern Bohemia is currently in the process of finding a new path without coal. Ibra’s photographs remind us that the scars in the landscape and in people 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 artworks 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. 

The opening will take place on May 7 at 6:00 p.m. in the foyer of the Hraničář Hall.