Tolerance Posters

On December 5, the Tolerance Poster Show in Sofia was installed on the fence of the National School of Music. The School is situated on one of the capital's most iconic streets — Oborishte Street — in immediate proximity to the Union of Bulgarian Artists, Shipka 6. There, from December 15, 2025, to January 20, 2026, the 11th International Triennial of Stage Poster — Sofia 2025 is on display, which this Tolerance Poster Show was a part of. On Saturday, December 13, the organizer of the Tolerance exhibition received indications that some parents had protested to the principal of the Music School. On the evening of Monday, December 15th, parents tore off four panels they considered problematic. All four billboards have posters with rainbow colors. By the morning of Tuesday, December 16th, the principal ordered the removal of the complete exhibition. Now, not just the colors of the rainbow, but all the colors are gone. All that's left is the iron fence and the black tarpaulin. An  ...

On September 18, 2025, we held the opening of a beautifully displayed Tolerance Poster Show at Belgrade Fortress   (Kalemegdan) in Belgrade, Serbia. The show was a part of the broader Tolerance Campaign — a joint initiative of the United Nations and the Council of Europe launched earlier this year to promote inclusion and counter hate speech. The exhibition underscores efforts to use art, education, and public engagement to challenge prejudice and strengthen solidarity. But that didn’t last long. After being hung, the posters of Andrzej Pagowski of Poland, Blazo Kovacevic of Montenegro, and Levente Bendek of Romania were soon vandalized. The poster of Levente Bendek was vandalized repeatedly. First, somebody drew a skinhead symbol and scratched homophobic slurs. Then, someone ripped the rainbow flag depicted in the poster. After that, even more hateful messages and symbols were drawn over a rainbow flag that continues to be torn. So much for tolerance. Unfortunately, this happens ...

On September 2, at the Tolerance Poster Show in Mostar/Bosnia and Herzegovina, a poster of Tarek Atrissi from Lebanon was vandalized. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Tolerance posters have been vandalized, burned or destroyed. This has already happened in Zagreb/Croatia, Timisoara/Romania, Bratislava/Slovakia, Chelyabinsk/Russia and Ljubljana/Slovenia. An interesting piece of information is that out of exhibitions in 48 countries, posters were vandalized or destroyed exclusively in the countries of Eastern Europe. And this is not a coincidence, this same poster among others has already been destroyed a couple of times before. This already happened at the first Tolerance Poster Show in Ljubljana in 2017. You can read the text about it here . Or the text about graffiti "attack" by Neo-Nazis in Zagreb here .

  Inspired by the travelling Tolerance Poster Show , Tomislav Bobinec, a professor at FH JOANNEUM Design & Kommunikation in Graz, Austria, came up with the idea and organized a workshop with design students from the Institute of Design & Communication of the FH JOANNEUM in cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences Dortmund, Germany, the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and the School of Design University of Zagreb, Croatia. Posters created at the workshop are of a wide range of design approaches and became part of the “Students for Tolerance” exhibition. After being exhibited in Graz at the Design Monat festival, in Berlin during the Berlin Design Week and in Ljubljana, the exhibition took place in the Republic of Croatia Square in Zagreb, which is in front of the School of Applied Arts and Design and the Museum of Arts and Crafts.   This morning, a “citizen” told the police that one of the posters from the exhibition offended him with its content. Later, a ...