The LABIRYNT Festival of New Art was conceived 23 years ago by Jerzy Olek, with the first 10 editions held in Klodzko. Later, from the 13th edition, the festival moved to Slubice, where the Okno Gallery, run by Anna Panek-Kusz, a student of Professor Jerzy Olek, operated in the Slubice Municipal Cultural Center.
Since its inception, the event has been interdisciplinary, that is, it has presented art in general - painting, printmaking, drawing, performance, installations, sculpture, video art and photography, with photography having a distinct advantage over other disciplines, according to Prof. Marianna Michalowska, who has been associated with Labyrinth for many years. This year (Oct. 21-23, 2022) I didn't notice that advantage, but I also stipulate that I didn't see all the exhibitions, which took place not only at SMOK, Urad, or Spectrum in Frankfurt. Many of the shows were held in other locations that, for lack of time, I simply did not get to. Nevertheless, I saw the main exhibitions, which allows me to form an opinion about the Slubice-Frankfurt festival.
This year's Labyrinth took the window as its theme, as the Window Gallery has just celebrated its 20th anniversary. The theme can be understood so broadly that it is a very capacious field of interpretation for both artists and audiences. For us, that is, for people interested primarily in photography, the main festival exhibition was a show entitled "The less, the more," which was Jerzy Olek's interpretation of minimalism in art. As curator, he invited several artists to participate, including the head of the Labyrinth, as it were - photographer - Anna Panek-Kusz, as well as Štěpán Grygar , Michal Jakubowicz, Timo Kahlen, Wolf Kahlen, Miroslaw Koch, Michael Kurzwelly, Boguslaw Michnik, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Marek Pozniak, Marek Radke, Carola Ruf, Marcin Ryczek, Tadeusz Sawa-Borysławski, Zdenek Stuchlík and Gisela Weimann. This is an interesting exhibition, although, in keeping with the exhibition title, I would have preferred to see fewer artists, but with more works represented.
"Outward and Inward Views" is an exhibition at Spectrum Galerie in Frankfurt curated by Rudolf Němeček, featuring works by Czechs Petr Moško, Zdeněk Mudroch, Rudolf Němeček, Iva Pavlátová, Pavel Rejtar, Monika Simek Fulková, Zdeněk Stuchlík and Petr Šulc. Interesting photographs of the view from the window of his house, in the recently fashionable method of embedding the image in resin, were shown by Patrick Huber, who confessed in an offhand commentary that he loves the views so much that he doesn't want to leave the house at all.
One of the forms of "taking the festival out into the city" was a social action addressed to residents of Frankfurt and Slubice, who were invited to send in photographs of their views from their windows. More than 200 photos came in, most from Slubice, which were displayed in the form of a slide show in one of the rooms of the cultural center. The resulting collective portrait of their small homelands says a lot about the place where these people came to live. Looking at these photographs, I wondered about the intentions behind taking and sending such shots. I think that these intentions can be divided into three groups: some wanted to boast about the visual attractiveness of their views, others, on the contrary, seemed to say: see how bad it is for me, because I have to look at this every day, and the third, finally, treated participation in the campaign as an opportunity to demonstrate their artistic abilities, hence the sunrises and sunsets, surprising framing, playing in focus/out of focus, and so on.
An attractive highlight of the program was Saturday's trip to the Urad Valley, a place several kilometers away from Slubice, where a house of Mr. and Mrs. Kusz is being built among greenery made of clay and sand, also conceived as a place for meetings, exhibitions and other artistic events. This year, the courtyard and the immediate surroundings of the house were also used to present a performance by Michał Bałdyga, installations by Janusz Tylman and Jan Herdlick, and paintings by Tomasz Fedyszyn.
Labyrinth, like other festivals of this type, is also lectures, workshops and, above all, informal meetings between people who practice different artistic disciplines on a daily basis. Such an exchange of experience in Slubice, Urad and Frankfurt has another value, namely international integration, in this case Czech-German-Polish. It turns out that people of the arts, including photography, have a lot to say to each other, and even when they are sometimes separated by a language barrier.
A detailed program for this year's Labyrinth can be found at HERE.
