Szukaj
The Biebrza Wetlands are a grand monument to nature: one of the very few in Europe and comparable to the Pripet Marshes in Belarus, or the Danube Delta in Romania.
“When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears,” the photographer Philippe Halsman recalled. At the end of the photo shoot, he would say with a smile on his face: “Jump!”
Art historian Ania Diduch talks with photographer Wojtek Wieteska about out of focus photographs, deckchairs, and colliding with the world at “Unseen”, an exhibition of Robert Frank’s work at the renowned gallery, C/O Berlin.
Curator Martin Gasser talks about the death of his long-term collaborator Robert Frank, how he conceived his latest exhibition, and the value of ‘unseen’ photographs.
After years of documenting death and suffering, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado turned his lens towards life – the biodiversity of our planet’s flora and fauna, and its indigenous peoples who live in harmony with nature.
Art historian Ania Diduch talks with photographer Wojtek Wieteska about erotic woodcuts, garden photography and a new kind of spatial thinking at the recent Kyotographie photography festival in Japan.
Hércules Florence invented photography three years before Daguerre, and pioneered the study of birdsong. Surprisingly, his innovative achievements are largely forgotten.
A Polish rock singer and songwriter reflects on her connection with the street photography of Vivian Maier, which has found a permanent place in her consciousness.
“The Republics of the future depend on how their youth is raised…” This is a quote written on the wall of the J. Zamojski Academy. What are Polish schools like? Well, everyone in Poland knows that quite clearly. We can hear Gombrowicz chuckle from beyond the grave... Why? An attempt to investigate the contemporary educational system was undertaken by the photographer Karolina Wojtas.
Maurycy Gomulicki, 1996
Harry Gruyaert, 2003
Stas Bartnikas’s favourite place to fly to and photograph is Iceland. He believes that Iceland is one of the most photogenic countries when looked from above – the combination of ice, snow, volcanic formations, glacial rivers, beaches and ocean makes for an absolutely surreal sight.
The project “Garden” by Marta Zgierska and Mateusz Sarełło is an invitation to observe a couple in a dialogue, negotiating their relationship and their collaborative authorship. The boundaries between the two are ambiguous; obsessive, poetic and analytical. Zgierska is dedicated to systematic fragmentation and dissection of the image of her own body, but at the same time also the dissection of flowers as symbols of other women. This results in persistent acts of contradictory self-inscriptions, at the same time violent and subtle.
The works from the “Brushing Grass” series document simple performative actions among clusters of grass. Brushed with a comb or smoothed out with the artists’ bare hands, the plants look like humanoid heads, adorned with thick mops of hair. And yet they resist; unruly ‘hair’ sticks out, grasses break when touched.
The depiction of female anger as irrational, hysterical, and just plain ugly has a long tradition: from harpies, witches and Medusa, to young girls inculcated to be polite and smiling, to memes of raging feminists and the so-called Resting Bitch Face syndrome.
The concept of identity, like that of reality itself, has become amorphous and multiplicitous. The result is a fluxing world in which fixity has been replaced by the potential for a range of shifting forms. In an individualistic culture, we can assemble and deconstruct ourselves at will, with the strict bonds of old giving way to a liquid instability.
At first glance, one can assume that Igor Omulecki’s works from the Solaris cycle stay within the orbit of post-minimalism and op-art. After all, the minds of the inhabitants of the art world are somehow trained to create such connotations. However, as Władysław Strzemiński put it in his Theory of Seeing: “It is not what the eye catches mechanically that matters in the process of seeing, but the consciousness man has of his seeing.”
Somewhere in Eastern Europe, children gather every summer to wear military uniforms, camp in tents under harsh conditions and practice firing guns. For an outsider, the idea itself seems scary. For them, it’s the time of their life.
