NO'AM – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Grzegorz Wełnicki pursued the NO’AM project for thirteen years. The starting point of this long-term study on the subject of transience was the death of a close person. The artist met people who had escaped death and those who knew that it would come soon. In the documentation, he used various photographic techniques, from close-ups of post-autopsy bodies to abstract portraits. He photographed the workings of the mortuary and modern methods of storing corpses. He learned the secrets of companies dealing with thanatoplasty and cryogenics. Wełnicki invites the viewer to reflect on existence as a constant process of transformation, inextricably linked to our transience. As a member of the Institute of Good Death, the artist promotes the “death positive” movement, encouraging an open dialogue at the end of life, which is often a taboo subject in culture. 

• Grzegorz Wełnicki

  • is photographer and visual artist. He combines documentary photography with abstraction, working with various visual media to create highly emotional images. A graduate of the Department of Photography at the Łódź Film School; member of the Institute of Good Death and the Archive of Public Protests. Together with the APP, he was the laureate of the 10th edition of the Views competition at Zachęta (2021). He was nominated for the Polityka Passports. Wełnicki’s works have been presented, among others, at the Athens Photo Festival, Verzasca Foto Festival, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, at the Łódź Photo Festival, and at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin. He has published, among others, in Eikon, British Journal of Photography, Frieze, Life Framer, Szum, and GUP Magazine.