Where’s the Afters?

The project Where’s the Afters? depicts the protest period in Slovenia, which lasted from May 2020 and April 2022. During this time, the world entered a previously unknown state of uncertainty, fear and widespread confusion with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. With growing unease, conflicting information and some questionable policy measures, public frustration flared up and sparked a wave of protests across the country. These initially popped up rather spontaneously, but eventually grew into an organised weekly civic initiative – mostly taking place on Fridays – drawing attention to pressing social issues and controversial political practices. In parallel, several protests were organised by other social groups, raising different issues and criticisms of the situation (such as the anti-RVT [Recovered – Vaccinated – Tested] protests).

The series of protest photographs by Nik Erik Neubauer also started spontaneously, but then, in light of the increasingly thematic structuring of the protests, grew into an extensive collection of images that today not only represent a systematic archive of what happened in those days, but also a self-contained approach to the genre of reportage-documentary photography. Moreover, it is protest photography that often plays a key role in shaping the collective narrative of a specific protest movement. This is why, in certain cases, such photography moves from recording to commentary and interpretation by the person behind the lens.

Nik Erik Neubauer (1994) is a visual artist and a photographer from Ljubljana. In his work, he deals with the intimate social issues of our everyday life with a contemporary documentary approach. He graduated in photography at VIST – Faculty of Applied Sciences in 2017 and obtained his master’s degree in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2021. In 2021, he was nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award and GUP Magazine named him amongst the most promising European photographers.