exhibitions

Can photography reject figuration and free itself from the constraints of documentary recording? This exhibition (September 26 - November 10, 2024) presents a turn towards abstraction and emptiness in the experimental works of photographers Andrzej Georgiew, Mariusz Hermanowicz, and Antoni Zdebiak, as well as in the contemporary works of Dominika Sadowska. The exhibition is part of Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2024 – the largest contemporary art festival in the region!

In the age of expanding digital museums and archival collections, we often encounter works of art solely through reproductions. We usually watch them in virtual conditions - without a background, removed from their spatial and temporal contexts. Easily available here and now, they are susceptible to editing and alterations in scale or framing. Exhibition Where is the original? Art in photography presents photos by Antoni Zdebiak (1951–1991), Jan Fleischmann (1940–2019) and Danuta Rago (1934–2000), who photographed paintings, sculptures and artistic installations in a creative and non-obvious way. The Archeology of Photography Foundation invites you to the exhibition at the Social Center of Photography at Chłodna 20 Street from May 17 to June 30, 2024.

We are pleased to invite you to the exhibition on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Archeology of Photography Foundation. The experience of working with archival photographs over such a long period of time makes us proud but also provokes reflections. And so, rather than presenting the history of our Foundation through the prism of its most outstanding successes, we would like to reflect upon the character of working with archives as a non-governmental organization.

The exhibition focuses on photographs of flowers and plants. Compared to the considerable volume of works from the field of architectural documentation, this subject may seem marginal in Chrząszczowa’s artistic practice. And yet it is difficult to resist the impression that the images of plants – intimate, saturated with a very special emotional charge – were in some way very important to the artist.

Photographs by Maciej Musiał from 1969-1971. What did the reality in 1970s Poland look like from the perspective of a 23-year-old photographer? What themes were discussed and published in the student press? What did the photojournalist focus on and what distinguished his works?

What was it like to work on the iconic record covers of the 1980s? What was the creative process behind the photographs used for records and posters of such bands as Republika or Budka Suflera? Antoni Zdebiak collaborated with the most popular musicians of the 1980s, including Brygada Kryzys and Majka Jeżowska. The exhibition presents unpublished material from the photographer’s photoshoots, making it a perfect opportunity to trace his artistic inspirations.

Exhibition opening: November 10, 2021, 7 p.m. The photography archive of the Archeology of Photography Foundation includes several representations of a body, mostly a female body – from documentary photographs, images from the realm of eroticism and pornography, to works that incorporate a female body in the artistic search and practice from the area of abstract photography or include it in their conceptual framework. Bodies of the Other – and thus those understood as strange, unfamiliar or underprivileged – are also present in travel photographs, documentary series from trips to the outskirts and suburbs, as well as in images of so avidly photographed children and animals. The spectrum of body representations also includes numerous images of dolls, sculptures, dummies, skeletons, and toys.

The Carousel exhibition presents 45 photographs taken by Harry Weinberg in 1966-1973. All of them were commissioned by the Eastern edition of Poland magazine, Polsha. The Archeology of Photography Foundation has been working on the photographer’s digital archive since 2020. This is the first exposition of Weinberg’s oeuvre at the gallery at 20 Chłodna Street in Warsaw. The great majority of photographs will be presented outside the press context for the very first time.

Many photographers of the post-war era got involved in projects related to applied photography; only a few specialized in this genre, while the vast majority accepted commercial assignments on the fringes of their regular photojournalistic or artistic activities. Authors often undervalued this part of their work because of its commercial dimension. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the knowledge about this genre of photography is still insufficient. With this exhibition, we would like to draw attention to applied photography as a creative field and grant it equally important status.

The Exhibition is to recall the life and work of Julia Pirotte (1908-2000), a Jewish photographer, journalist, communist, social activist, and author of the photographs from the Marseille uprising (1944) and – to a great extent perished – photographic documentation of the Kielce Pogrom (1946).

The point of departure for Sława Harasymowicz’s exhibition is a tragedy that took place in the closing days of World War II, in Neustadt Bay, near Lübeck. Prisoners evacuated from the Neuengamme concentration camp lost their lives in the bombardment of three German ships by the RAF; among those who perished was the artist’s great-uncle, Marian Górkiewicz.

We are pleased to announce that an exhibition of Jerzy Lewczyński’s and Krzysztof Pijarski’s works, curated by the APF’s Karolina Lewandowska, opens on 24 January 2013 at Fotohof, Salzburg. More information available on the Fotohof website >>> Exhibition is on until 16 March 2013.

Archeology of Photography Foundation is happy to invite you to yet another chapter of the Living Archives project, within which the contemporary artists work with the historical photography collections, enriching them with their own, new interpretations. For several reasons the new exhibition is different to the previous ones – Magda Franczak, an artist invited to co-operate with the Foundation, has decided to reinterpret the collection of anonymous portraits which belong to the Jewish Historical Institute. Almost 500 glass plate negatives, originating from 1930’s, have been organized, preserved and digitalized by Archeology of Photography Foundation in the collaboration with The Jewish Historical Institute, and were made available within The Virtual Museum of Photography. Little is known about this unique collection – neither the names of the photographed people, nor the author of portraits have been identified. Negatives, brought to The Jewish Historical Institute years before, perhaps got there for a reason – the person who handed them over must have been aware that this institution takes care of the Emanuel Ringelblum Archive as well as other legacies of Jewish life from before 1939 and after the Holocaust. And thus, the place the collection came from determined its interpretation. It was presumed that at least a significant number of the portraited people had been of a Jewish origin. Most probably majority of the individuals photographed in 1930’s did not survive the next decade.

The exhibition From Photographer’s Notebook, presenting Tadeusz Sumiński’s works, is a subjective selection of photography notes from journeys. The oldest photographs were taken during trips to Italy and Spain in 1957 when the author had just started working as a photographer and had been freshly accepted as a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF). Other works come from the 1960s when Sumiński was employed as a full-time photojournalist in Polska monthly magazine aimed at African and Asian countries and started working intensively in this field.

Archeology of Photography Foundation is happy to invite you to a hosted exhibition by Belorussian artists group Veha (veha.by). Belorussian artists group Veha (veha.by). Collective locates vernacular photography in the central point of their interest. Archival photographs from private collections searched throughout entire Belarus, turn into a tool aimed at studying tradition, history, and collective memory.

Photographing – as it is commonly known – is inextricably bound with the process of voyeurism, looking that often transgress the borders of intimacy. Such is also the case when we work with archives – the remnants and fragments of somebody’s art pieces, but also his/her life. The Eye Chamber photography installation authored by Tomasz Szerszeń describes the exchange of looks and glimpses which enter the space of the archive. Its reference point constitutes the body of work by Marek Piasecki (1935-2011), a photographer, artist working with heliographs, author of dolls, sculptures, and collages. Many of his photographs are of an intimate character, he often processes and exploits the motive of the perverse stare or voyeurism.

Antoni Zdebiak treated art as a process and a ritual, and his own body – as a tool. In his photographs, he usually became his own model. His archive contains hundreds of self-portraits. There are classic examples among them, in which we can see Antoni Zdebiak’s face or rather hundreds of his faces. In other works, we observe him in action. We invite you to visit Antoni Zdebiak’s solo exhibition which will take place within Warsaw Gallery Weekend.

This time, Archeology of Photography Foundation has invited CENTRALA Designers’ Task Force to cooperation within the ‘Live Archives’ project. On a daily basis the group members - Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis - are involved in working on architectural and art projects, deriving their inspiration from 20th century avant-garde. From the perspective of researchers, designers and re-constructors of historical exhibitions they have taken a closer look at the archives of an exhibitioner, graphic designer and photographer, Wojciech Zamecznik.

Archeology of Photography Foundation presents exhibition during Triennial of Photography in Hamburg between 6th and 15th of June. The exhibition features Polish photographers: Antoni Zdebiak, active in the 80s., and contemporary artist Magda Hueckel. The project focuses on performative photography as a way of self-exploration.

What unites graphic design, stage design, photography and cinema is this interest in the new, in the development of both technology and contemporary artistic language,” wrote Wojciech Zamecznik in 1961. The dialogue between photography and the graphic arts begun in the first two decades of the 20th century would prove especially fecund in the two-and-a-half decades following the end of the Second World War (1945–69). This exhibition looks at the post-war interaction of the two disciplines through some hundred photographs and other pieces drawn from the holdings of the Centre Pompidou and from public and private collections abroad. Often little known, these works cast light on an important phase in the relationship between photography and the graphic arts. While many graphic designers explored the use of photomontage, others favoured the formal abstraction that photography offered. Obtained by ingenious experimentation, their photograms and light drawings were used in advertisements, cultural posters, book covers and record sleeves. The representatives of this new visual sensibility were in great part trained or inspired by the Bauhaus. A pioneer in uniting the fine and applied arts, the school had seen the designer as an agent of society charged with the expression of the contemporary spirit. The books of the leading figures of the Bauhaus would exercise a decisive influence on these post-war photo-graphic artists, among them Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1925) and Vision in Motion (1947) and György Kepes’s Language of Vision (1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956).