The tenth anniversary edition of the FFWRS includes, in addition to the main exhibition by residents Sara Ahde, Jack Poremba and Antonina Gugala, the premieres themselves. The first exhibitions will already be waiting for the festival's viewers traveling by rail at the Sopot Centrum. In the industrial space adjacent to the train station, we will see an exhibition by Artur Plawski and a presentation of the most interesting Polish photo books from the constantly replenished FFWRS archive. The curator of both exhibitions is Pawel Klein.
Near the iconic pier, the State Art Gallery in Sopot will host the exhibition "Images that fall from the sky" of the Helsinki School of Photography and Szymon Roginski's premiere project "Alcohols 24″. Roginski's new series of dozens of photographs is being created in Poland and is a continuation of his earlier series ("Internets," "Tombstones," "Kebab"), in which the artist looked at the architecture of urban service outlets. Exploring ephemeral, often difficult to interpret, façade subjects, Roginski showed the evolution of the digitization of society, the culture of funeral services and death or the history of the migration of people.
FFWRS discovers young talents. At PGS, we'll see a post-exhibition of students from the Film School in Lodz, and at Sopot Centrum an exhibition of the most interesting photographic works prepared by students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. In turn, at Klubokawiarnia Dwie Zmiany we will get acquainted with the works of graduates of the WFH Sopot School of Photography.
A colorful point on the exhibition map of this year's festival will be an exhibition of photographs by Finnish artist Emma Sarpaniemi, presented in the gallery at Goyki 3 Art Incubator. In her projects, Sarpaniemi explores the concept of femininity through humorous, unconventional self-portraits. The exhibition "Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower" will feature works from the artist's latest series.
We are planning to premiere a series of "Fire seasons", photographs depicting fire, taken from various sources by French artist Nicolas Giraud, in the space of Sopot. Each photograph will be found in the form of a sticker, in an edition of 1,000 copies.
The tenth "Within Sopot" Photo Festival will be accompanied by an exhibition of works by Jan Bulhak and his son Janusz, exhibited in Sierakowski Manor, the headquarters of the Society of Friends of Sopot. Jan Bulhak does not need to be specially introduced to photography lovers, he is one of the most prominent representatives of pictorialism in Poland. The main subject of Bulhak's works was the Polish landscape in symbolic terms, architectural monuments and poignant portraits. The photographs presented in the exhibition titled "Jan Bulhak and Son - Sopot Recovered 1945-1949″ were taken in the second half of the 1940s, during the post-war wanderings with a camera, on which Jan Bulhak went through the recovered lands with his son Janusz. They show the rebirth of life in postwar Sopot. The idyllic atmosphere of the works and their poetic nature provide a strong contrast to the images of the just ended war. The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Museum of Photography in Krakow and curated by Klaudyna Karczewska-Szymkowiak.
Traditionally, a souvenir of successive editions of the festival is a photo memorial, the idea of which is a spontaneous clash between the viewer and art. So far, photos of such legends of Polish photography as Tadeusz Rolke, Chris Niedenthal, Zbigniew and Maciej Kosycarz, Rafał Milach and Wojtek Wieteska have appeared in the urban space of Sopot. The author of the photography presented during this year's FFWRS is Jan Bulhak.
For our faithful viewers, but also for those who may decide to come to the festival in Sopot for the first time, we are preparing a birthday gift - we will boast the archive, which over the past 10 years has included the works of outstanding Polish and foreign artists, including.Among them Rafał Milach, Elis Hoffman, Ilona Szwarc, Tadeusz Rolke, Diana Lelonek, Kacper Kowalski, Weronika Gęsicka, Magda Wunsche and Aga Samsel, Konstancja Nowina-Konopka, Soren Lilholt. Once presented in exhibitions, they will now be seen in the city space.
The motto of the 10th edition of FFWRS is "North." "In creating the festival's theme, I considered the ambiguity of the word "north" in the Polish language and its symbolic meaning. Does it have a geographical dimension, or is it associated with a specific moment in time? What is the meaning of "zero o'clock," a point on the map, "the light of midnight" or the lack thereof? How is it affected by the daily rhythm of life, the 24-hour cycle that depends on seasons, tides, rises and falls, rises and sets, travel from south to north and back again? Naturally, the north as a point of reference also stems from Sopot's location on the map of Poland, and the participation of artists from Finland opens our gaze to areas lying even further north of the Baltic Sea." says Maciej Stępinski, chief curator of the jubilee edition of the "In the Frames of Sopot" photo festival.
This year's installment of the Sopot festival will be accompanied by meetings with artists and curators and guided tours of exhibitions. A detailed program of the anniversary edition of FFWRS will soon be available at www.wramachsopotu.pl