Festival warm-up

We know that you can’t wait for the opening of the festival and that you are kicking your heels impatiently at the very thought of exhibition openings. Relax. The City Program partner galleries come to your rescue, as they are inviting you to the opening of their photographic exhibitions already this week.

SEE YOU… RIGHT NOW
Fotofestiwal features several dozen accompanying exhibitions of the City Program. The first of them has been on display for over a month at the Central Museum of Textiles. It is worth taking some time to see it before the festival rush kicks off, as it is the most extensive overview of Bownik’s works so far, titled Undercoat. You will have an opportunity to enjoy series such as Gamers, which focuses on teenage e-sports players, one of the artist’s most recognisable projects Disassembly, in which he disassembled and re-assembled exotic flowers, as well as the abstract The Colors of Lost Time, and also the most recent works created in 2021 especially for the exhibition at the Central Museum of Textiles: Remnants, Chamber, Ceiling, and photographs of clothes from the museum’s collection comprising the Reverse series. The exhibition exposes what is hidden “under the surface” of reality: of the world of fashion and glamor, of youth and freedom, of clothing and history. That’s Bownik all over.

Right now, you can also visit the exhibitions of Dagmara Bugaj, Anita Osuch and Marek Domański at Chimera Gallery, and also Weld & The Room at Fundacja Działania. On Saturday, a unique exhibition titled Ukrainian Borscht and Sour Soup or Community from the Kitchen opened at the Wschodnia Gallery. It is a collection documenting the social and culinary events at the gallery and a journey through the history of the Łódź artistic community of the 1980s and 1990s. It will be complemented by a tour of the places which had an impact on this history, with the participation of the people who created it (12.06 at
13:00, start: Wschodnia Gallery).

TUESDAY
Tuesday is the first day of the festival warm-up: at 17:00 we’re going to open the exhibition of works by the students of the Photographic Activities Studio titled Common Parts, presented in Galeria ASP at 68 Piotrkowska Street, as well as… festival’s first exhibition closing: it’ll be your last chance to see re_vival’22 by Ewa Bloom Kwiatkowska in Ośrodek Propagandy Sztuki at 44 Sienkiewicza Street.

WEDNESDAY
An intensive cardio session will be guaranteed by Wednesday’s four openings – including exhibitions related to this year’s festival theme: COMMUNITY. At 15:00, in the BiblioArt Gallery you will see the outcome of an unusual artistic encounter of students of the Film School and the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning at Lodz University of Technology. They will present the photographic projects I am not alone and City Identity as a Community Frame. At 17:00, in the Nasza Gallery at 17 Piotrkowska Street, another unusual collaboration will be presented. With no one else’s eyes! is a work of twenty-five young
people with visual impairment. The artists’ works focus on their home cities: Stuttgart, Łódź and Strasbourg. At 18:00, at 112/114 Piotrkowska Street, the search for communities will go beyond the anthropocentric perspective. In the centre of the latest exhibition of Frakcja, an intergenerational group of Łódź artists, there will be an alphabet of (un)human community: a house, light, monstera, kaleidoscope, shoe, rabbit, reflected in many media: video, performance, installation, photography or painting. The Wednesday’s marathon will finish with the opening of Konrad Kuzyszyn’s exhibition Developing/Calling in the Olimpus Gallery and the exhibition titled War Feed. In the Szklarnia Gallery at the Film School you will find a series of works related to the presence of the war in Ukraine in social media. The project was developed by fourth-year students of photography at the Łódź Film School during the course of collaboration with the studio co-run by Witek Orski and Krzysztof Pijarski.

THURSDAY
We will finish our pre-festival training session just before the festival opening. At 16:00, Dom Literatury will exhibit touching, medium-format photographs by Sonia Handelman-Meyer. She is one of the photographers of the New York Photo League, an association which has become a part of the history of American photography thanks to its candid and empathetic portraits of the poor, the neglected, the stereotypically perceived at the time, or simply ordinary bourgeoisie in the streets and yards of New York. At 17:00 at Księży Młyn, we’ll present the result of collaboration between art schools from all over Poland. Drawing on the history of the International School Review, organised by Fotofestiwal in 2003-2011, the Strzemiński Academy of Art in Łódź has once again invited other academies to cooperate with a view to creating a platform for exchanging the achievements and effects of work of students and teachers from schools associated with photography in Poland and abroad.

Our workout is going to end with a sprint finish to Art_Inkubator for the opening of Fotofestiwal at 19:00. There, you will see four exhibitions from the Community Program, six from the Open Program, meet the winners of the Photographic Publication of the Year 2022 and the PDF Book Mockup contest, listen to the amazing concert of Ukrainian neofolk band YAGODY, dance until dawn to the beats of DJ Finger Trips, to continue the festival gymnastics already on Friday morning!