exhibitions

Multiple portrait, associated in Poland mostly with the archives of Marcel Duchamp and Witkacy, was one of the most popular photographic games in the early 20th century. Private collections and home archives still hide photographs with multiplied reflections of models. The Russians called it the “American trick,” while the Americans referred to it as multiphotography. It arrived to Poland thanks to Witkacy, who brought the idea from St. Petersburg.

As part of the Retelling the City project, the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw is presenting two exhibitions prepared by the APF: The Chroniclers. Photographs of Warsaw 1945-1947 and Stadium 55. The former shows little known works of Zofia Chomętowska and Maria Chrząszczowa who, having returned to Warsaw in 1945, documented the city’s ruins and gradual reconstruction.

We warmly invite you to the opening of the exhibition of photographs by Antoni Zdrodowski, a photographer from Białystok. The private view will take place on the 3rd of April (Thursday) at 6.30 pm at the Archaeology of Photography Foundation’s gallery. The exhibition has been curated by Grzegorz Dąbrowski. Feel welcome to take this opportunity to also visit our neighbours – Starter Gallery and Stacja Muranów.

Our readers are encouraged to see the exhibition Fotorejestr. Wolska  / Ebert as part of the I Artist. Archives and Amateurs section of the annual Fotosfestiwal in Łódź. Exhibition opens on 6 June at 7. p.m.  and is on view through 16 June.

One of the most influential representatives of the Polish postwar photographic avant-garde, Zbigniew Dłubak started working on the theme of the female nude around 1958 and continued it for the rest of his practice. However, he was never considered an expert in nude photography, a paradox that can be explained by the fact that his nudes always followed modernist logic, serving to make statements on the language of photography, on the processes of sign creation and interpretation, or on the mechanisms of visual perception. Emphasized, such theoretical investigations were far more important than the fact that they were carried out on photographs of the naked female body. Gallery>>>  Photographs >>>

We’ve posted a gallery of photos from the exhibition Zbigniew Dłubak. Body Structures, part of Photoespaña 2013. Exhibition curator: Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, exhibition design: Jan Strumiłło.
Photographic documentation: Jakub Certowicz / Skanery niewiarygodne
Gallery>>>

Bolesław Augustis. Every Day is a second instalment in a series of presentations of interesting out-of-Warsaw collections organised by the FAF as part of the Fototeka project. 
A very large collection of 35 mm films and several dozen glass negatives left by Białystok-based photographer Bolesław Augustis (1912-1995) was discovered in 2004; through the efforts of Grzegorz Dąbrowski, a photojournalist working for Gazeta Wyborcza’s Białystok edition, the collection was archived and safely stored. 
 

The cover of the Shoes and Accessories catalogue published in 1954 by the Warsaw Institute of Industrial Design (IWP) features open-toe sandals and a wicker-and-canvas handbag. Just as modern design and local traditions are merged today, so, it turns out, they were under real socialism. The comprehensive catalogue text discussing the summer collection prototypes suggests that the designers sought not only functionality of form but also economically viable and hygienic solutions. Behind the text’s ideologized language stands a product-design philosophy that sounds surprisingly modern and fresh today.

The APF is launching a new exhibition series, Phototheque: starting this year, besides authors represented by the Foundation, we will start showing interesting but little known archives from outside Warsaw. The purpose is to contribute to the charting of a decentralised map of photographic individualities. The series begins with Energy of Time. The Dalkia Archive, a collection of photographs from ca. 1922-1940 by Łódź-based documentalist Wiktor Jekimenko, which premiered at the ‘Fotofestiwal’ International Photographic Festival in Łódź in 2011. The exhibition opens on 12 March 2013 (Tuesday) at 7 p.m. Curators: Marta Szymańska (Fotofestiwal Łódź), Marek Domański.

The photographs, small notes, studies, and working prints of Wojciech Zamecznik (1923-1967) share an oneiric feel and a surrealistic visual quality. Virtually each originates in a differ ‘order’, each served a different purpose, comprised a different narrative, and yet are all formally close. The photographs and film excerpts presented in the exhibition at the Archaeology of Photography Foundation lift the veil of reality.

Two different approaches to the human body, two extreme perspectives, a polarized experience of the body and two completely different contexts come together in the photographs by Szymon Rogiński i Zbigniew Dłubak.
The series Wir In Dresden by Rogiński and Systems – Gesticulations by Dłubak differ in just about everything except the fascination with the naked body and its photographic representation.

The exhibition Between the Frames. Photographs of Zofia Chomętowska from Polesie 1925-1939 marks the first comprehensive presentation of photographs by Zofia Chomętowska (1902-1991) in Poland in over 30 years. The artist, an exceptional and somewhat forgotten figure of Polish culture, was among the best-known and most awarded photographers of the 1930s.

On Friday, 19th October, Nova Gallery at the Center of Photography in Minsk will host the opening of the exhibition Land-Scapes. Re-Activation which brings together different views onto the local realities in Belarus and in Poland. The exhibition features selected fragments from larger projects by six photographers whose work refers to the place they live in, its history, lacks and topical issues. With: Karolina Bregula, Andrey Kolesnikov, Uladzimir Parfianok, Krzysztof Pijarski, Konrad Pustola, students of the Center of Photography.
 

Warsaw / Lives / Ruins brings together two tales about Warsaw, or two “archeological digs” of the city. Today, the idea behind Warsaw’s reconstruction after the Second World War—as a promise of social utopia—remains largely invisible. The city’s pre-war roots are but hieroglyphs. Krzysztof Pijarski and Tomasz Szerszeń have embarked on an attempt to decipher this underlying urban grammar, and to listen in on its faint language.
Warsaw / Lives / Ruins marks the first collaboration between the two artists and scholars, who have however been engaged in a creative and intellectual dialogue for years. It is also the result of their shared fascination with Warsaw as a mirage—and an exploration of its latent, potential and imagined aspects.The exhibition features two projects: Warsaw Antiquities and The Lives of Non-Saints.

Katarzyna Mirczak made a strong debut on the photographic scene with her series Special Signs, presented at Paris Photo in 2010 by the London gallerist Eric Franck (Eric Franck Fine Art). Although Special Signs was never exhibited in Poland, the work was noticed by local critics (and discussed in Art&Business and Obieg, amongst others). ether, an exhibition that premiers at Warsaw’s Archeology of Photography Foundation, offers a Polish audience an occasion to explore the work of Katarzyna Mirczak.

1 & 2 is an exhibition built around the issue of applying a mathematical-logical regime in artistic practice. The main pretext for this analysis is the little-recognised work of Janusz Bąkowski (1922-2005), where the theme dominated.  Bąkowski, a self-taught artist who soon became a significant member of the 1970s neo-avantgarde community, was fascinated by the relationship between the ostentatious rigour of mathematics and the freedom of art opposed to it – in his large-format photographic panels and objects, this order is reversed. The clear, realistic representation of photography, sculpture and painting gets decomposed, losing its clarity by means of precise geometric divisions and mathematical calculations.

Mariusz Hermanowicz, The Battlefield / exhibitionAnna Molska, PHOTOGRAPHS (LOOK WHAT I FOUND HERE) / video During this year’s edition of the Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Archaeology of Photography Foundation offers the first presentation of Mariusz Hermanowicz’s archive, whose research commenced at the beginning of 2015. This premiere presentation will include an individual exhibition of the artist’s works and a video piece by Anna Molska.

The exhibition offers a new reading of Zbigniew Dłubak’s (1921-2005) two celebrated series: his experimental works from the late 1940s, and Asymmetry, presented in a dialogue with drawings and studies for paintings that were not published or exhibited before. Geometries also features a number of hitherto unknown photographs from 1948.

With the countdown to Euro 2012 well underway, the Archeology of Photography Foundation and the National Cultural Centre set out to explore the history of the Warsaw stadium. From March 9, a previously unknown photographic series by Zbigniew Dłubak, documenting the final stage of the construction of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium in 1955, will be on view in Warsaw’s Kordegarda gallery.

One of the characteristic features of contemporary culture is the constant development of a field of phenomena produced as a result of the inertia of artistic media, the blurring of boundaries between them, and their mutual interplay. At the same time, spectators take on the role of artists increasingly easily, entering into a complex network of reactions to stimuli provided by objects of culture. Today we are both witnessing and actively contributing to the acceleration and fragmentation of the system of culture.