There are artists who photograph light, and there are artists who listen to it. Nataša Segulin belongs to the second group. In her Lumen series, light is not a tool but a protagonist that enters abandoned spaces with the patience of something ancient. It reveals without announcing itself. It touches ruin as if touching a face.

The three photographs gathered here form a small constellation within the larger body of Lumen. Each one opens a passage into the former Servite monastery in Koper, a place shaped by centuries of use, silence, and return. The building is collapsing inward, yet what Segulin finds is not despair. It is the strange beauty of a structure that continues to breathe in the dark.

In one image, a vertical shard of light falls on a wall whose paint has curled into delicate scales. The crackled surface glows like an old manuscript. Time is not the enemy here. It is a collaborator. Another image offers only a corner of white wall where shadow moves like a memory. The surrounding darkness feels immense, yet the light insists on being seen. In the third image, light travels across the floor in a thin, golden line. It is almost nothing, yet it anchors the entire frame. A horizon inside a room.

Segulin’s photographs rely on minimal means. Darkness, texture, a single opening where daylight slips through. Yet the effect is expansive. These works invite us to stand at the threshold between the visible and the invisible, between what remains and what has already passed. Their silence is not empty. It holds the weight of lived histories and the warmth of human presence, even in their absence.

Lumen is not a document of a building. It is an act of attention. Segulin gives light the freedom to guide the narrative, and in doing so she reminds us that illumination is never neutral. It reveals, but it also transforms. It creates small moments of tenderness inside decay. It dignifies what has been forgotten.

In these photographs, hope does not appear as a declaration. It appears as a glimmer along the floor, as a softened edge on a ruined wall, as the quiet persistence of light returning to a place that has lost almost everything. Segulin offers us that return. It is simple, profound, and full of grace.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume