A History of Fictions — Blind Journal

An imaginary world inhabited by people dedicated to a curious animist cult, and one other, tragically actual, the place a person claims to return from a distant star to gather a younger girl’s life insurance coverage. A efficiency through which members re-enact iconic moments of Polish historical past, and an archive recognized for fueling right-wing and far-right discourse. A delicate portrait of a mountainous area turned refuge for fugitives and exiles in an Eastern Europe weakened by warfare — and one other, gentler imaginative and prescient, of a panorama with vibrant colours recalling conventional people costumes.

At Photo London, Circulation(s), or the Fotofestiwal in Łódź, Polish images has as soon as once more displayed its many sides this yr. Rooted in a posh heritage and nourished by mysterious mythologies, it displays a shared ambition amongst its practitioners: to “free ourselves from the past while projecting an image of a confident and diverse Poland,” as Anna Szkoda places it. It is a solution to query the mechanisms of historic transmission — and their reliability — whereas bringing the notion of reminiscence into the non-public sphere. This want is shared by Tomasz Kawecki, Michał Sita, Jana Sokja, Agata Grzybowska, and Łukasz Rusznica.

Hating historical past

“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,” recollects Łukasz Rusznica. It is that this resentment that drove the photographer, along with Beata Bartecka, to publish How to Look Natural in Photos, a e-book primarily based on the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance — a group of pictures produced inside a system of citizen surveillance, taken by troopers, secret police brokers, or these working instantly inside 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 vital distance is shared by Michał Sita, whose tasks take the type of investigations that method the previous not as an absolute fact shaping nationwide identification however as a device that reveals our capability to think about it, remodel 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 city, Morwana Goślina, in a participatory spectacle celebrating Poland that phases a “romanticized version of nationalism and Catholicism — presented as the country’s core values.”

For Agata Grzybowska, too, her relationship together with her homeland is difficult. The photographer sees images as a way of protesting in opposition to sure choices of the conservative authorities. After years spent documenting battle zones, she turned to the Bieszczady Mountains to create 9 Gates of No Return, a delicate portrait of a area that grew to become “a mythical land synonymous with freedom” following the redrawing of Poland’s borders. The challenge emerged from a therapeutic immersion in nature — a spot the place the feelings sure up within the violence of previous and current conflicts may lastly be launched, making room for a brand new type of inventive creation.

Separating actuality from fiction is futile

How, then, to make these new trajectories seen? How to reinterpret one’s nationwide heritage in a manner that summons the non-public in addition to 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 actuality from fiction has turn out to be pointless. On the opposite, it’s vital to present form to what’s thought-about self-evident. Tired of discovering no faith that matched his personal standards, Tomasz Kawecki created, with In Praise of Shadows, a universe the place individuals worship animist deities — acknowledging and respecting the “darker” facets of nature. The challenge is impressed by Lower Silesia, a area with a wealthy post-industrial heritage relationship again to the postwar interval and one among Europe’s oldest mining areas. “The Nazis built enormous shelters and bunkers there,” provides the photographer.

In landscapes scarred by the traumas of warfare, 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 occasion: a girl, manipulated by a person claiming to return from a star, ends her life within the hope of becoming a member of him. On the sting of fairy story, the collection ideas the imaginary into the true, twisting its cloth and creating a way of strangeness. The challenge marks a turning level within the artist’s observe: “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 rising Polish images impressed by related 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.”

Follow information from the Łódź Fotofestiwal and the evolving panorama of Polish images here.