July 13 (Saturday), 3:00 pm - 8:00 pm / ESTA Gallery of Contemporary Art - Gliwice, 8 Raciborska St. / The exhibition can be viewed until August 26
Jadwiga Janowska and Jakub Dziewit are artists who, despite using radically different aesthetics, meet with an understanding of the fundamental fiasco of photography. A photograph is an image and a construct, just like the traces of others engraved in us in the form of distorted perceptions or selective memory. In a mutual, melancholy dialogue, they creatively share the impotence of an authentic encounter with the other in the frame, as well as the longing for a person who is slipping away.
The exhibition is guided by the words of Roland Barthes, illustrating the illusory nature of photographic representations, in which the I-Thou is obscured through the multiplied mediation of the images we produce:
"In front of the lens, I am at the same time: who I think I am myself; who I would like to be thought to be; who the photographer thinks I am; and finally, who the photographer is using."
The exhibition exposes corporeality, at the same time it is not about bodies as such. The body here is an image and material. In the case of the artist, a painterly set of patches of decaying memory. For the artist, bodies are the building blocks for non-obvious constellations. In tandem, the artists depict non-bodies and non-humans, or rather, the sets of shapes and meanings we ascribe to them. Nudity turns out to be an unfulfilled promise of intimacy. Whether the shots would be affectionate, playful or pornographic they remain mere o b r a z e . By looking at them, posing for them, and immortalizing them we replicate social visual patterns, and apply our own filters.
Excerpt from the text accompanying the exhibition by Aleksandra Golecka
Jadwiga Janowska - Assistant at the Faculty of Arts of Jan Długosz University in Częstochowa. Graduate of the Institut Tvůrčí Fotografie in Opava, Czech Republic. She participated in the Nikon NOOR Academy mentoring program (2022). In 2018, she won the main prize for photojournalism in the Young Poland category of the Grand Press Photo competition. Winner of the Jan Sawka Award at the Fama Festival (2021). Second prize in the Talent of the Year competition organized by Pix House (2021). Her work has been exhibited at home and abroad, including the Granze Arsenali Fotogafie Verona, Oslo Negativ Fotofestival, Rotterdam Photo, Merlinka Festival in Serbia, Noorderlicht Photofestival. A member of the Hydroza collective. The main medium she uses is photography, but she also reaches for collage or video. Most often she deals with portraiture and contemporary documentary. She touches on issues of identity, the passage of time and contexts of space. Read more: jadwigajanowska.pl
Jakub Dziewit - Visual artist, cultural expert, curator and publisher of photographic publications. President of the unContemporary Foundation, lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of Jan Długosz University. Author of the photo books "This is not another Martin Parr exhibition" and "Desires of meaning", a dozen exhibitions, as well as photographic performances and two scientific monographs on the history of visual culture. He deals with art that is thoughtfully over-intellectualized and, in contrast, painfully affective. He has photographically reworked themes of corporeality, everyday life, the legacy of modernism, but also cognitive mechanisms and ways of constructing meaning in images. More: dziewit.art.pl