My Twenty Years
The castle in Janowiec


‘My twenty-year-old’ is a type of a photographic essay, a polyphonic dialogue that pictures the emotional and artistic attitude towards the last 20 years through a series of subjective articulations. On one hand there’s a tender interest in the changes and a spontaneous need to perceive them, on the other an escape from extemporaneousness and cheap publicism. In return, a cautious view taken by a ‘lazy passer-by’ searching for real symptoms of change in day-to-day entanglement, a view that is a sign of doubt in traditional reportage, in its power of description and all-pervading indication of the ‘climax’.

It’s a protest against arrogant rapid-fire cameras that produce pictures for immediate consumption. It’s a collection of photographs forcing viewers to contemplate and emphasizing that it’s possible to get unchained from the burden of our history. This unique anniversary encourages to quit with the poetics of a school academy. It allows us to reflect on the shape of our collective imagination, so that we could transform our reality and tell about ourselves, just like the authors do!

Dawid Furkot

The idea of this exhibition is Poland as a notion, image, name and symbol. The students of photography from the Film School portrayed it documentarily, metaphorically, descriptively and neodocumentarily.

To see is to understand, because the process of observation cannot be separated from understanding and changing reality. Once being the only medium transmitting the so-called ‘objective truth’, the photographs presented at the exhibition are free of pathos and commitment. Understanding appears in the active space of photographers searching for certain fragments of reality. On one hand they capture the disappearing world, on the other they extract different meanings of it. After 1989, great changes have occurred in the Polish landscape, which opened a wide space for the photographers with a developed sense of observation: from existential need to register changes, to experience and feast their photographic eyes with pleasure.

From pessimistic attitude, present despite of the 20 years of independence, to a warm perception and contemplation of changes. A common opinion is that young people do not have a personal attitude towards their country, that they do not comment on what happens here, that the word 'motherland' is a strange notion.

This exhibition contradicts all those opinion: Anna Dobrowolańska’s sophisticated commentary made in one of Radom factories; Dawid Furkot’s stab of pain down our native longings; juxtaposition of two real but completely different places in Tomasz Walczak’s works; 10th-Anniversary Stadium- the decline of the new commercial Poland- in Kuba Rubaj’s shots; cool distance in Anieszka Wrześniak’s photographs presenting Silesia industrial enterprises; Przemysław Pokrycki’s capture of social rituals; sublime photographs prepared by Kama Rokicka, Filip Gabriel Pudło, Grzegorz Nowak, Igor Oleś, Anna Orłowska, Anna Wiśniewska; wit in Łukasz Brześkiewicz’s shots; Krzysztof Miller, Jan Wajszczuk, Michał Przeździk, Bartek Jurecki's emotionally engaged perception; all of it is a demonstration of artistic potential and personal comment on Poland, their inspiration.

Marek Szyryk

 
© Copyright 2009 Festiwal Filmu i Sztuki DWA BRZEGI Kazimierz Dolny-Janowiec n/Wisłą 2008 - Dyrektor artystyczny Grażyna Torbicka. All rights reserved.
Foto - Agencja TRIADA Katarzyna Rainka oraz Tomasz Stokowski. Projekt - Bartosz Rabiej. Nazwa Festiwalu - Miroslaw Olszówka. Strona by Sara Kozińska.