09/27/2026
Borut Holland, also known as Borut Hlupič and Soya Holland, is a Slovenian artist, poet, mystic, and sociologist born in 1956. His practice encompasses painting, drawing, poetry, conceptual art, performance, and spiritual study. Emerging from the alternative cultural scene around Celje and Ljubljana in the 1980s, Holland has exhibited in Slovenia for decades, including at the Celje Gallery of Contemporary Art and, in 2019, the 9th Triennial of Contemporary Art U3 at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana.
haul gallery first encountered Holland’s work without knowing his name. In 2021, a friend who wrote for Jewish Currents told us about mysterious emails that several of the publication’s writers had begun receiving. Knowing haul, our friend thought we would find them interesting. We emailed the sender and asked to be added to their mailing list.
For the next two years, the emails continued. We examined each one, trying to understand who was making the work and where it was coming from. Eventually, one contained a link to a large Google Photos album. Among the many artworks was a collage made over a black-and-white photograph of a young man. Written in one corner was a name: “Borut Holland.”
We searched it. At the time, the only trace we could find was a webpage by Slovenian artist Franc Purg called The Cottage of Borut Holland. It described Holland as an artist and mystic in the area of Pečovnik who wanted to live in the forest. Beginning in 1999, the artist group Skupina worked with the surrounding community to secure land and permission to build him a home. Construction began in 2003 using salvaged materials. More than fifty people contributed labor, and an artist from Belfast constructed a bicycle-powered electrical system for the cottage.
haul tried repeatedly to contact Holland directly, without success. Four years after we first encountered his emails, one of his friends finally responded and put us in contact with him. Our ongoing conversations with Borut have revealed a lifetime of being an Inevitable Artist, and an enormous body of work.
