Iosif Király – Old Memories Are Getting More Persistent

This will be the first solo exhibition in Poland of one of Romania’s most renowned and distinguished visual artists. The exhibition is organised as part of the Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025.

Iosif Kiraly is a keen observer of how memories of past events, both personal and collective, constantly accompany us and change with time and the accumulation of new experiences. Although photographs are for Iosif Kiraly anchors thrown into the past, he does not consider memories as snapshots that appear identical whenever we open a photo album and look at them. Rather, memories are experiences compressed in the brain, which each time they are brought into the present, interpolated and reconstructed in different ways, depending on the emotional state of the present, information and experiences accumulated in the meantime.

The exhibition offers the visitor the opportunity to see how the artist translates into images, and how he perceives the way the memory’s mechanisms work, addressing some of his favorite themes – synchronicity, symmetry, the feeling of déjà vu or false recognition.

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Iosif Király is a visual artist, architect and educator. In the 1980s he was active in the international mail-art network, an artistic movement generated by the Fluxus group. In 1992 he started teaching at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and in 1995 he was one of the founders of the Department of Photography and Dynamic Image. He is currently the director of the Doctoral School at the same university. In addition to his individual artistic activity, he has also been active in various collaborative formulas, the best known being the subREAL group. After 2000 he initiated, coordinated and carried out several artistic research projects in interdisciplinary collectives, including RO-Archive, an extensive visual documentation of the mutations taking place in post-communist Romania in several fields (industry, agriculture, commerce, education, religion, sport, tourism, architecture, transport, etc.). Over the years, he has participated in numerous exhibitions, symposiums, art residencies and his works are in prestigious Romanian and international public and private art collections.

Curator: Roxana Trestioreanu
Organizer: Romanian Cultural Institute 

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Muzeum Miasta Łodzi (Museum of the City of Lodz), Ogrodowa 15

DID YOU KNOW that the Museum of the City of Lodz is the largest palace in 19th-century Europe? 

It was built by Izrael Poznański, the richest Jewish factory owner in Łódź (he was not the richest of all in Łódź, though, as the wealthiest one was Karol Scheibler). Next to the palace is Manufaktura, the former Poznański’s factory. Rumour has it that Poznański earned his first money by walking his skinny dog (or horse) around the backyards of Piotrkowska Street, where he collected all sorts of old rags. He then cleaned and sold them in the Old Market. Later, all it took was a good marriage, and the business began to grow rapidly. Izrael became one of the most important factory owners in Łódź. The palace is hugely impressive. Its beautiful rooms (especially the dining room) played in many films, e.g., “The Promised Land” by Andrzej Wajda.