Event date
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Podsumowanie
Opening on 25th May 2018, Family Values: Polish Photography Now will be the first exhibition in the United Kingdom to focus solely on Polish photography.
Content
The Family Values: Polish Photography Now will present works by Polish artists whose photography and cinematography touches on issues related to the sense of identity, family and home in the context of social and political transformations. Together these works will seemingly create an archive of the cultural transformations in Eastern Europe in the past few decades. The exhibition was prepared by the curator and art critic Kate Bush.
The central part of the exhibition will be Zofia Rydet’s famous, monumental project Sociological Record, which aimed to document every household in Poland. She began working on the project in 1978 at the age of 67, and took nearly 20,000 pictures until her death in 1997. Zofia Rydet was fascinated by how choices and decisions regarding interior design reflect a person's mentality and creativity, as well as their religion or political beliefs.
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Rydet's work celebrates the individual freedoms that citizens could enjoy in their own homes at the end of the communist era. Józef Robakowski, artist, filmmaker and leading figure of the avant-garde under late communism in Poland, followed a silimar path. He began working on his series From My Window in the same year that Rydet began work on her Sociological Record, and took as long to finish. For more than twenty years, the artist filmed what went on outside his kitchen window in his apartment in Łódź. His camera, pointed down at the square below, followed the daily activities of neighbours and friends, also filming gatherings, such as marches for May Day. This perverse pseudo-documentary provides an unusual insight into everyday life during a dramatic, political transformation.
The exhibition will be accompanied by many events including a series of discussions organised in cooperation with Dr. Urszula Chowaniec, which will be held at the UCL School of Slavic and Eastern European Studies.
In the exhibition, images by Zofia Rydet and Józef Robakowski will be presented alongside contemporary Polish artists exploring similar topics in their work: Aneta Grzeszykowska, Weronika Gęsicka, Aneta Bartos and Adam Palenta.
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The project is co-organised by Calvert 22 and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of POLSKA 100, the international cultural programme accompanying the centenary of Poland regaining independence. Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multiannual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2021.
Source: press materials, compiled by the Culture.pl team, translated by NR, Apr 2018
