The APF is completing the digitisation of documents from Zbigniew Dłubak’s archive, including the artist’s correspondence and personal notes. A list of the whole collection will be available online soon. Right: photo by Jakub Certowicz.
Work on Maria Chrząszczowa’s archive has been under way. Best known for her documentations of the ruins of 1945 Warsaw, Chrząszczowa’s photographs have been shown in an APF exhibition and featured in the publication The Chroniclers. As part of recent work, some of the author’s earliest negatives have been straightened, secured and scanned. Besides the ruin documentations, the collection includes photos from the 1950s and 1960s, showing Warsaw’s architecture, including newly built developments. The whole collection will be available online soon.
We have completed the digitisation of 3 hours of Wojciech Zamecznik’s 16 mm films from 1949-1967. The footage documents family life, artistic meetings and trips, as well as Zamecznik’s exhibitions.
A new publication, Teoria sztuki Zbigniewa Dłubaka [Zbigniew Dłubak’s Art Theory], ed. Magdalena Ziółkowska, is available (since 2 March) at the Foundation. Graphic design by Joanna Jopkiewicz. Gallery >>>
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.
Wojciech Zamecznik (1923-1967), was an outstanding graphic artists, and one of the founders of the “Polish school of posters”. In his practice Zamecznik consistently employed photographs he had personally taken—transforming them in the course of experiments with different light-sensitive techniques, creating abstract records of light as motifs for further posters and covers, and including documentary photographs, taken during everyday activities as well as on journeys, characterized by an exceptional sensitivity to form.
From 20th to 24th of October 2012, the Center of Photography in Minsk hosted a workshop Animation Through Photography co-organized by the Archeology of Photography Foundation. Organizers: Archeology of Photography Foundation, Center of Photography, Nova Gallery of Visual Arts, partner: Polish Institute in Minsk.
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.
With over 140 images by an icon of Polish photography, Zofia Rydet, a cutting-edge graphic design by Wojciech Zamecznik, and meaningful quotes from the writings of Janusz Korczak, Little Man is a unique volume. Published by Arkady in 1965, the art book still makes the most delightful impression with both its photographs and its form, an original approach to the child theme and the charm of rotogravure print.
As part of the documentation of Wojciech Zamecznik’s archive, we have digitalized over 250 portraits of 1960s-era visual artists, among them leading representatives of the Polish School of Posters, e.g. Henryk Tomaszewski, Józef Mroszczak, Roman Cieślewicz, Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Młodożeniec, Franciszek Starowieyski, Waldemar Świerzy, Wojciech Fangor, Tadeusz Trepkowski, Julian Pałka, as well artists such as Eryk Lipiński or Alina Szapocznikow.
It is our pleasure to recommend a book recently published by the Foundation: Restauracja / Restaurant by Julia Staniszewska and Mikołaj Łoziński is available in two language versions Polish and English.
Restaurant, by writer Mikołaj Łoziński and photographer Julia Staniszewska, brings together three stories: that of the fall of a restaurant in the suburbs of Warsaw that saw its glory days before 1989; that of the fall of the family that used to run it; and a fragment of Polish history – the transformation from communism to capitalism.
The Foundation has just concluded work on the digitization of Zbigniew Dłubak’s drawings. The works date from different periods, ranging from before the war, through the time of occupation, to post-war years. All of them will be available on our online database soon, in the meantime, we invite you to take a sneak preview in the gallery.
The work was made possible through financial help from the NiNA.
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.
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.