Democrats, Milosz, and “2, 4, 24”

Lviv residents welcome fall in a special way – through the mirror of photography. An art project is launched in the city, which will show different approaches to what Susan Sontag called “collecting the world” – documenting the social or personal events and objects by means of photography. The project consists of three exhibitions of recognized masters of Polish photography – Jacek Dziaczkowski, Wojciech Prazmowski, and Krzysztof Wojciechowski.

♦  “MILOSZ. THE LOCAL”

Renowned master of creative photography Wojciech Prazmowski, after traveling thousands of miles, taking thousands of photos, collecting numerous material “evidence” and “samples,” reproduces with extreme ease the events that are distant in time and space, feelings and states, colors, tastes, smells, and views. “Prazmowski combines well-known and totally new facts from the life of the Nobel laureate, writer Czeslaw Milosz, exploring the places he visited, re-experiencing the minor events, on his own, literally, step by step, recreating the daily rituals of his hero, and combining them with destinies and places of his parents, whose young years and the meeting that became crucial for the artist actually happened in Lithuania,” said the curator of the project “Studio of Record – 2013” Andrii BOIAROV. The exhibition “Milosz. The Local” features material artifacts, and even real samples of soil from dozens of places visited by the writer in Lithuania and Poland.

♦  “2, 4, 24”

Krzysztof Wojciechowski has a radically different approach to the study of reality. The photographer is ascetic and simple in selection of means, his images are made in the technique of traditional black-and-white photography, static and concrete in their composition, performed mainly in the small radius of the daily routine actions or the usual walks. “Wojciechowski’s project ‘2, 4, 24’ just like all of his creative work seeks to explore in detail on relatively simple material of ordinary objects and actions, their constituent entities and entities of their perception – the current of time, the change of space, as well as the tool of this analysis – photography,” continued Boiarov.

We must add that the series “24” (or “Samurai Collection”) will have its premiere in Lviv and will be presented together with the already classic series “Trivia” (“4”) and another series of “sets” – “Double Images” (“2”). The project “2, 4, 24” is a significant page in the great book of stories of the Polish post-conceptual art and photography in particular.

  Following the exhibition Marek GRYGIEL, curator of photography and visual art at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and photo editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, will give a lecture on the wider context of works by Krzysztof Wojciechowski and other powerful figures of conceptual art movement in Poland at the art gallery “Yefremova, 26.”

♦  “DEMOCRATS”

  However, the central event of the project will be the presentation of the series “Democrats – Lviv, 2004” by Jacek Dziaczkowski. Shortly before the Orange Revolution in Ukraine the author made about three hundred black-and-white portraits of people in full-length wearing orange symbols (later the artist painted them in his Warsaw studio, adding nothing but the orange color). “Here Dziaczkowski with ease predicted the emerging ‘decisive moment’ in our history, though avoiding major events and places – maidans in Kyiv and Lviv, swirl of emotions and enthusiasm, moving crowds and flags,” said Boiarov. “The images, unlike the usual for us bright records from November-December 2004, are static and do not snatch especially ‘good-looking’ people with ‘European’ appearance from the crowd – it seems that he only literally and metaphorically stopped ordinary people in a silent question about their expectations, opportunities, and future. The power of these images and their ‘non-obvious’ meaning is in their potential, future choice and actions.”

  Nine years later, these images and people from them return to the streets of the city – the main idea of the project “Studio of Record – 2013” is to place the photos in full length on the walls in the city center. They can induce memories and assessments of time and events that have passed, but the question raised by Jacek Dziaczkowski through his work, as well as his wish “to have another moment like this for both Ukraine and my Poland” is still relevant. The artist means the moment of making a conscious choice and taking responsible actions.