Singularity

Venue: Museum of Photography, 16 Józefitów Street
Opening of the exhibition: 29 September 2017, 18:00
Exhibition open until 31 December 2017

Many intriguing images stirring a debate about the definition of art have been created as a result of the author’s error, ineptitude or simply by chance. They have contributed to the important and still topical discussion about the influence of images. Often photographic pictures created by chance get the value of something unimaginable, break the viewer’s feeling of comfort. Singularity is a project which proposes a new and attractive formula of thinking about photography. The exhibition does not focus on the customary questions of the pre-existence of the people, things and situations featuring in the photographs. Instead, visitors are strongly encouraged to make use of their imagination and to see the showcased photographs as new, open and autonomous worlds, in the way they do when looping at paintings.

Photographs selected for the exhibition include pictures, in which the generally accepted photographic imagery convention is distorted, such as in the case of not following good framing practices, the picture orientation in disagreement with its theme, mechanical and biochemical damages of photographic emulsion. Photographs breaking the binding portraying canons, disturbing photos because of the ambiguity and the general atmosphere of the situations seen in the picture, photographs of strangely posed people and formally strange objects, photos using various kinds of deformation, pictures showing themes which rarely appear in photography (e.g. photographs of explosions), singular portraits of animals (e.g. animals on pieces of furniture, one of the leading motifs of the project visual identification), examples of iconoclastic practices (e.g. tearing off, cutting out the model’s face) and purposeful retouch and photomontage practices in old photographs.

The exhibition comprises around 130 photographs carefully selected from the Museum collection. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in Polish and English. The exhibition and the accompanying promotion of the catalogue are parts of the programme of events accompanying the Joseph Conrad Literary Festival in Krakow. The exhibition and the publication have been designed in collaboration with the students of the Polish-Japanese Academy of Computer Technologies. The exhibition at the Museum will be accompanied by an outdoor exhibition in the urban space (citylight tram/bus stop sheds).

Exhibition Curators: Bartosz Flak, Marta Miskowiec.