Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Central Europe... Whatever we call this area marked at its inception by both Byzantine and Frankish Empire influences, thinking about it triggers emotions over and over again, from uncertainty to nostalgia to awe, and sometimes a whole diverse range of feelings, as seen in literary or cinematic narratives describing the European phenomenon. For an outside observer, the...
Archeo KF
Nature has generously endowed the world with coils. Many kinds of reptiles or crustaceans boast the ability to coil their bodies, but other animals also make use of this shape - if only during sleep. What we observe in some species externally is much more common under the skin: nerve ganglia, brain ganglia, etc., to end up in the fetus, which until birth....
It's a strange feeling when a man living in the same time as you presents you with the archaeology of your time, your country, your history. I first saw Christoph Grill's work five years ago on a table during a portfolio review in Bratislava. These were photographs taken in the former Soviet Union. Many people photograph there. The post-Soviet reality is for young photographers....
Many Polish photographers after World War II until now have been trying to tackle one of the most difficult subjects of Polish reality - Silesia. How to present its synthetic vision, and above all the people and their problems, as well as the degraded environment and architecture? Such an attempt was also made by Jerzy Wierzbicki, who had already faced the subject of...
Come here, Youth, come! Behold, a new morning rises, A picture of truth hitherto unknown, Doubt and clouds of reason, Disputes for the crowd's delight - Behold, they have dispelled. Madness is a dark forest, It's a labyrinth of madly tangled roots. How many have fallen there! What they should care for, They do not know; In darkness for bones they stumble The dead in this wilderness. I...
Poverty, unemployment and rural overpopulation are the main reasons for labor migration in Asian countries. The main destination of this migration is the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf region affiliated with the so-called GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council). Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman). There are several reasons for this. The cultural center of the Middle East is the region....
The legacy of socialism? I think it is humiliation and indifference. You stand before a committee that decides your fate. If you expect someone else to solve your problems, you expect certainty, as if it were free. Yet only gifts are free. Knowledge and action are the tools with which you can gain certainty; they are not given. How can you pursue...
The work of Bronislaw Schlabs is primarily associated with the photographic avant-garde of the late 1950s, with the innovative photography exhibition organized together with Jerzy Lewczynski and Zdzislaw Beksinski, which went down in history under the name "Antiphotography", and with abstract photographic compositions made without a camera - "Photograms". Meanwhile, virtually unknown are the photographs that Schlabs created before the period of photographic abstractions,...
In these images - unlike in almost all of Pawel Zak's work to date - the glue of the whole seems to be above all white; so far, his photographs have been kept in fleshy, dense, dark, almost gloomy tones. The change from the so-called low key to high key is accompanied by the abandonment of the saturated grays of silver techniques in favor of the colors offered by the latest technologies....
Communist Poland is associated with gray: gray people in a gray landscape. Gray concrete facades, advertising signs in dull colors, no lights on the streets, monochromatic clothing made of poor-quality materials, ugly paper packaging. This atmosphere is documented - already in the new reality - in Nicholas Winter's (b. 1973) sepia Polaroids from the series "New Wilanów" (2009). Poland after 1989...