Misliti glasbo / Thinking Music — Photography Exhibition

On Wednesday, 9 September 2026, at seven in the evening, Gallery GONG opened its doors on Kidričeva ulica 20 in Nova Gorica for Misliti glasbo — Thinking Music — a group photography exhibition on view until 15 October 2026.

The show brings together three established music photographers: the Italian author Luca Alfonso d'Agostino and the locally rooted creators Jernej Humar and Žiga Koritnik, all of them working the border area between the two Goricas. Curated by Nataša Kovšca, founder and director of the gallery, the exhibition presents new works the three have made over recent years at music festivals on both sides of the border.

The opening evening belonged as much to the region's music community as to its photography scene: all three authors attended the vernissage, and the frames — concert stages, backstage corridors, musicians' portraits — drew a steady stream of visitors into the white cube. Fittingly for a city that spent 2025 as half of Europe's first cross-border Capital of Culture, the exhibition speaks three languages at once: its title travels between Slovenian, Italian and English, and the event is carried in the continuing programme of GO! 2025, whose afterglow still shapes the cultural calendar on both sides of the erased border.

The white cube of Gallery GONG on Kidričeva ulica 20 · Photo: Galerija GONG

Three Lenses, One Stage

Each author arrived at music photography by a different road — one through the newsrooms and festival pits of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one through the documentary school of Prague, one through four decades of jazz festivals from Ljubljana to Skopje and New York. Together they form a small cross-border atlas of the scene: where one favours the dynamics of the concert event, another lingers in the half-light of the backstage, and the third distils a musician into a single psychological portrait.

Slovenia

Žiga Koritnik

The veteran of the jazz pit — Ljubljana

Born in 1964, Koritnik has been photographing musicians since 1987 and is the dean of Slovenian jazz photography. Based in Ljubljana, he is a fixture of the Ljubljana Jazz Festival, the Druga godba festival and Cankarjev dom, and since 1996 he has served as resident photographer of the Skopje Jazz Festival, which publishes an annual calendar of his images; in 2001 he spent seven weeks in New York documenting the Vision Festival. His photographs have appeared in Time Out, Jazz Times, Jazziz, Downbeat and the Village Voice, and on records for labels such as Tzadik, Intuition and Leo Records.

He self-published the photobook Jazzy-ga! in 1996, has worked as a TV and film cameraman for Televizija Slovenija since 1989, and counts more than sixty solo and forty group exhibitions across Europe, the United States and Asia.

AT GONG — new festival works of recent years: stage, backstage and the portrait as a form of listening.

Italy

Luca Alfonso d'Agostino

The chronicler of Friulian stages — Monfalcone

Born in Milan in 1968 and raised in Monfalcone — twenty kilometres from the gallery, on the Italian side of the border — d'Agostino has worked as a professional photographer since 1984 and as a journalist since 1989, becoming the visual chronicler of the region's music life: Udin&Jazz, Gorizia Jazz, Trieste Jazz, Sacile and the Jazz&Wine of Peace festival in Cormons, just across the former border. He is the official photographer of Mittelfest in Cividale del Friuli and has coordinated the photography team of the Rototom Sunsplash festival for over a decade.

His images illustrate records for ECM, Cam Jazz, Enja and Universal, and appear in Musica Jazz, Corriere della Sera, Il Sole 24 Ore and L'Espresso; in 2019 he co-founded the Associazione Fotografi Italiani di Jazz, the national association of Italian jazz photographers.

AT GONG — the Italian eye in the trio: decades of jazz seen from the photo pit, from Gorizia to Benicàssim.

Slovenia

Jernej Humar

The documentarian — Nova Gorica

Born in 1975 in Šempeter pri Gorici, a few kilometres from the gallery, Humar first enrolled in mechanical engineering before passing the entrance exam, in 1997, for the photography department of Prague's Academy of Performing Arts, Film and Television (FAMU), where he studied documentary photography. He graduated with honours in 2002 with the series Brezdomci (Homeless), mentored by the great Czech documentary photographer Viktor Kolář, after taking third prize at the Emzin photography competition in 2000 for his cycle Subway.

He lives and works in Nova Gorica, exhibiting at home and abroad, and is a constant presence at the region's concerts and festivals. For Thinking Music he focused his selection on the dynamics of the concert event itself — the surge and release of live performance.

AT GONG — the hometown perspective: the concert as pure motion, caught from inside the crowd.

A Borderless Frame

Thinking Music does not happen in a vacuum — it sits inside the continuing programme of GO! 2025, the first cross-border European Capital of Culture in the history of the initiative, in which Slovenian Nova Gorica invited neighbouring Italian Gorizia to share a single title under the slogan "GO! Borderless". The pairing is poetic: Nova Gorica was built from scratch after the Second World War, when the new border split it from Gorizia, the thousand-year-old town on the other side. The title year opened on 8 February 2025 at five venues across both cities, before a crowd of around 50,000.

An exhibition in which an Italian photographer from Monfalcone hangs beside two Slovenians from the Goriška region is that project in miniature. The works were made at festivals on both sides of a frontier that today exists mainly as a line of paving stones in Europe Square; the artists' common language is jazz — a music built, like the GO! 2025 programme itself, on listening across divides. That the show still runs in the autumn of 2026, months after the official title year closed, is a sign of how deeply the cross-border calendar has taken root.

Europe Square, where the two Goricas meet — the border once ran through this pavement

The 1947 border line, marked in stone on a street between Nova Gorica and Gorizia

The Venue — Galerija GONG

Gallery GONG, at Kidričeva ulica 20 in the centre of Nova Gorica, is an independent art gallery founded and directed by curator Nataša Kovšca, and has become one of the city's most consistent platforms for contemporary photography. Its recent seasons read like a cross-border diary: the gallery hosted the travelling project Made in Maribor, Novi Sad, Nova Gorica / Gorizia during the title year, co-curated with the Maribor Art Gallery and Gorizia's provincial museums, and co-produced Mejnosti / Borderlines, an international exhibition of fourteen photographers from Slovenia, Italy and Austria, with Ljubljana's Photon Gallery.

Thinking Music extends that line exactly: a regional institution using the Capital of Culture's momentum to stage work that is local in address and European in scope. With the show running until 15 October 2026, the gallery's modest white rooms remain one of the quietest — and most musical — places in the two Goricas this autumn.

From the world of "Thinking Music" — Ssirus W. Pakzad with his trumpet · Photo © Žiga Koritnik / Jazz Festival Ljubljana

Visitors with photographic prints inside Gallery GONG · Photo: Maribor Art Gallery (UGM)