An imaginary world inhabited by humans devoted to a curious animist cult, and another, tragically real, where a man claims to come from a distant star to collect a young woman’s life insurance. A performance in which participants re-enact iconic moments of Polish history, and an archive known for fueling right-wing and far-right discourse. A sensitive portrait of a mountainous region turned refuge for fugitives and exiles in an Eastern Europe weakened by war — and another, gentler vision, of a landscape with vibrant colors recalling traditional folk costumes.
At Photo London, Circulation(s), or the Fotofestiwal in Łódź, Polish photography has once again displayed its many facets this year. Rooted in a complex heritage and nourished by mysterious mythologies, it reflects a shared ambition among its practitioners: to “free ourselves from the past while projecting an image of a confident and diverse Poland,” as Anna Szkoda puts it. It is a way to question the mechanisms of historical transmission — and their reliability — while bringing the notion of memory into the personal sphere. This desire is shared by Tomasz Kawecki, Michał Sita, Jana Sokja, Agata Grzybowska, and Łukasz Rusznica.
Hating history
“At primary school, we studied the work of young poets who had written before dying during the Second World War. I found it horrifying that their lives, their emotions, and their experiences were reduced to the notion of a ‘period.’ There, in that classroom, in the front row facing the teacher’s desk, I hated history,” recalls Łukasz Rusznica. It is this resentment that drove the photographer, together with Beata Bartecka, to publish How to Look Natural in Photos, a book based on the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance — a collection of images produced within a system of citizen surveillance, taken by soldiers, secret police agents, or those working directly within the dictatorship. “We did not buckle under its weight but activated what was scattered, individual, wounded. Working with these images was only possible by placing ourselves against History,” he explains.
This necessary distance is shared by Michał Sita, whose projects take the form of investigations that approach the past not as an absolute truth shaping national identity but as a tool that reveals our capacity to imagine it, transform it, and act upon it. “History thus plays more the role of a case study than a true starting point,” he explains. In The Eagle and the Cross, he examines the involvement of the residents of a small town, Morwana Goślina, in a participatory spectacle celebrating Poland that stages a “romanticized version of nationalism and Catholicism — presented as the country’s core values.”
For Agata Grzybowska, too, her relationship with her homeland is complicated. The photographer sees photography as a means of protesting against certain decisions of the conservative government. After years spent documenting conflict zones, she turned to the Bieszczady Mountains to create 9 Gates of No Return, a sensitive portrait of a region that became “a mythical land synonymous with freedom” following the redrawing of Poland’s borders. The project emerged from a healing immersion in nature — a place where the emotions bound up in the violence of past and present conflicts could finally be released, making room for a new form of artistic creation.
Separating reality from fiction is futile
How, then, to make these new trajectories visible? How to reinterpret one’s national heritage in a way that summons the personal as well as the collective? “The historical imagination in Poland has undergone a tectonic shift in recent years, with the government’s cultural policy resting on a rewritten version of events,” says Michał Sita.
For many artists, separating reality from fiction has become pointless. On the contrary, it is necessary to give shape to what is considered self-evident. Tired of finding no religion that matched his own criteria, Tomasz Kawecki created, with In Praise of Shadows, a universe where people worship animist deities — acknowledging and respecting the “darker” aspects of nature. The project is inspired by Lower Silesia, a region with a rich post-industrial heritage dating back to the postwar period and one of Europe’s oldest mining areas. “The Nazis built enormous shelters and bunkers there,” adds the photographer.
In landscapes scarred by the traumas of war, Kawecki builds a fiction nourished by the ghosts of exploitation and the veneration of a sanctified nature. Between staging and documentary, Anna Szkoda reconstructs, with Sirius, the unfolding of a tragic event: a woman, manipulated by a man claiming to come from a star, ends her life in the hope of joining him. On the edge of fairy tale, the series tips the imaginary into the real, twisting its fabric and creating a sense of strangeness. The project marks a turning point in the artist’s practice: “I left Poland as a child, and as a young immigrant I learned that observation was fuel for my photography,” she explains. “Today, Poland haunts my work. The fragments I remember are disconnected from the country it has become. My research is driven by a deep desire born of the dislocation of the diaspora.”
Finally, for Jana Sokja, “the melancholy associated with the passage of time that emanates from [her] work” is symptomatic of “an influence of family and cultural memories” that contributes to the formation of an emerging Polish photography inspired by similar themes. “It’s linked to a sensitivity to the past, a desire to capture the most fleeting moments. We, as artists, immerse ourselves in the layers of personal and collective memories, using archival documents and intimate narratives to express a feeling of nostalgia and a need for introspection.”
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