Pracownia Wschodnia, the Trzy Kruki café & the JIL open-air gallery

Opening of the exhibition at Pracownia Wschodnia and the Trzy Kruki café: Wednesday 19 October, 18:00 / at the JIL open-air gallery: Saturday 22 October, 18:00

The exhibition presents recently completed projects that use the medium of photography in various ways, bringing together seemingly distant approaches to "taking" pictures — from darkroom experiments, through observing and documenting nature, to post-artistic actions and performance for the camera.

"Potencjalne narracje" [Potential Narratives] is also texts, a podcast and meetings in which we address the questions of « developing » photographs and manipulating them, and of how photographic frames shape our ideas about reality.

The artist and activist Yulia Krivich (b. 1988) invites people living and staying in the neighbourhood of Plac Hallera to be photographed. Through her action the artist involves the local community, of which she herself is part. In her projects Krivich combines documentary and art photography, and political themes with personal narratives. The artist increasingly addresses questions of language, and her gestures take the form of activism. Krivich's decolonial view of the interdependence of the art field and geopolitics in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the fact that she co-creates collective ventures that build alliances and support and spread knowledge and update ideas about Eastern Europe, become an important commentary on agency in a time of overlapping crises.

Through photography, video and performance, Jean-Samuel N’Sengi (b. 1994) evokes art-historical references and weaves in personal threads, creating colourful images full of tension. Combining visual self-expression and introspection, and balancing between the present and the past, N’Sengi explores relationships with his own body and with the bodies of the people he invites to joint performative works and choreographies. The Brussels-born artist places himself in the body of the "other" and of other identities in order to visualise the notions close to him of queer subjectivity, subversion and micropolitics.

Tomasz Saciłowski (b. 1972) presents at the exhibition a spatial arrangement built from multicoloured "drawings" made in complete darkness with a laser on transparent films used in advertising. To create his photograms Saciłowski uses various materials and techniques of analogue photography, often referring to nature and drawing on the logic of reusing half-destroyed photographic and graphic materials and film stock. Saciłowski tests the possibilities of different techniques and of exhibiting the results of his light-and-material explorations in different contexts. Each time he consistently undermines the aesthetic he is associated with.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication containing transcripts of conversations with Yulia Krivich and Tomasz Saciłowski and an essay on the work of Jean-Samuel N’Sengi.

Curator: Romuald Demidenko

Poster design: Mikołaj Grabowski