Residents Light Up Protest Photo Exhibit at Jovina Gimnazija
Parents of students hung a photo exhibition on the fence of Jovina Gimnazija in Novi Sad, and those gathered lit it up with phone flashlights and lamps. Suspended teacher Rima Grujic spoke.
On Saturday evening, August 8, 2026, the fence of Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj Gimnazija in Novi Sad took on a role it had never had before: it became a gallery wall. Parents of the school’s students mounted a photo exhibition called “Light It Up Too” on the fence and asked everyone who came to bring mobile phones and lamps. People lined up along the fence and pointed their light at the pictures, so the display was seen the way only something without its own lighting can be seen.
The photographs on show were taken at protests in support of teachers and students and during the blockade of the school building in 2025 and 2026. They are credited to Relja Kanovic, Vladimir Papuga, Vedran Bukarica, Denijel Zemanic and a group called Jovini zmajevi (“Jovina’s Dragons”). Current and former teachers, students and residents attended the gathering, and among those present were cyclists from the informal group Gvozdena Konjica (“Iron Cavalry”).
What the Suspended Teacher Said
Rima Grujic, a suspended teacher of Serbian language and literature at the school, addressed those gathered. She recalled Miloje Pavlovic, a professor and principal of the Kragujevac gimnazija who in 1941 refused the occupying forces’ offer to leave the execution site and save himself, saying instead that he was still holding class. From there she drew a line to the present day.
“They shot then. And they are shooting today. Not with weapons, but with injustice, humiliation and attempts to separate us from our classrooms and from the children we rightfully call our own. But we will not and cannot step back,” Grujic said.
Listing the measures teachers have been subjected to, in her words, formed the central part of her address.
“You can try to take our building away, you can go after our classrooms, you can suspend us, persecute us, try to strip us of our dignity, try to silence us, try to break us. But there is one thing you cannot do: you cannot make us give up the truth and the children we exist as teachers for,” she added.
Grujic said the tears teachers have shed over what has been taken from them will be worn as a medal, not as a sign of weakness.
“We do not cry because we are weak. We cry because we love, because we feel responsibility, because we know justice is worth every sacrifice and that freedom is not free,” she stressed.
She closed her address with the line repeated most that evening: “Those who betrayed the children will betray the homeland too.” Then: “We will not give up Jovina, Jovina is ours.” The reasons behind her suspension were not explained at the gathering, nor was any representative of the school’s administration present to address them.
Why the Fence, Not a Classroom
The answer comes down to one number: regular classes have not been held in the building of Novi Sad’s oldest gimnazija for almost two years. That is, in practice, an entire high school generation’s cycle without a home classroom. The fence was chosen deliberately. It marks the line between what students and teachers consider theirs and what they currently cannot access, so the exhibition was placed exactly on that line, on the outside of it.
The format itself is new. Protests in education have so far unfolded through class stoppages, marches and gatherings in front of relevant institutions, in other words through absence and movement. Here the opposite was chosen: a static display at a fixed point, with no podium and no sound system to carry the message beyond the circle around the fence. The message depended, quite literally, on how many people showed up with a lit lamp. The organizers said as much out loud, that the photographs would not stay in the dark.
Politically, this is a shift from the terrain of pressure to the terrain of endurance. A gathering measured by the number of participants can easily be dismissed as small. A display fixed to a school fence is measured by how many days it survives and by the fact that anyone who walks down that street sees it without any advance notice.
What Comes Next
The calendar is now the main actor. The new school year starts in early September, less than a month away, and it will raise two questions neither side has yet answered publicly: where Jovina Gimnazija’s students will attend classes, and in what status the suspended teachers will greet the first lesson. Until then, the fence exhibition remains the school’s only visible trace at its own address.
