06—10/12/2024
photo exhibition
Between Being and Non-Being
Alicja Kochanowicz and Maciej Kwietnicki (KWKO)
- Artists Alicja Kochanowicz and Maciej Kwietnicki first came to Opolno-Zdrój in 2021 for an open-air event organized by the Office of Post-Artistic Services. During their stay, the duo organized an analogue-photography workshop for local residents. In the following years, they continued the workshops. Participants were given analogue automatic cameras with colour or black-and-white photographic film. Their task was to capture the area. The artists wanted the locals to be able to take a fresh look at their surroundings, see them from a different perspective, and record important fragments of reality.
- Opolno Zdrój is a village located on the edge of the open-pit lignite mine in Turów. The company obtains the raw material regardless of the environmental or cultural cost. Residents of the surrounding towns live in a state of limbo, in places that are disappearing.
- The exhibition Between Being and Non-being will show photos taken during workshops over the years. The artists also insert their own visual narrative into the residents' narrative, showing photographs of key spaces in Opolno-Zdrój taken during artist residencies. In the process, the collective uses the method of anthotyping, based on the juice of plants collected from abandoned areas of the village. They treat this ephemeral photographic technique, whose prints cannot be fixed except by protecting them from sunlight, as a metaphor for the state in which the described village finds itself.
