Fotofestiwal 2024

As every year, Fotofestiwal guarantees their audience over 30 exhibitions and several dozen events presenting the landscape of Polish and international photography.

Overview

This year Fotofestiwal invites you to twelve exhibitions co-organized with city and university galleries and partner institutions from all over Poland. They will consist of an overview of the latest projects by contemporary Polish artists, student artists and two exhibitions representing Lithuanian and Romanian visual arts.

Encyclopaedia is a project consisting of several hundred fake entries found in encyclopedias, dictionaries and lexicons, illustrated by Weronika Gęsicka using manipulated photographs from photo banks and images created with the help of AI. The first exhibition after a long break of new, personal works by one of the most interesting contemporary Polish photographers and music video directors with several Fryderyks to his credit, Przemek Dzienis's Good Grief is a surreal experience reminiscent of a visit to a cabinet of curiosities, where photography remains only a memory. Botanizerka by the Lithuanian artist Dovilė Dagienė is dedicated to the story of a Holocaust survivor associated with Vilnius and Łódź, prof. Jakub Mowszowicz, who initiated the creation of the Łódź Botanical Garden in 1946. Organised as part of the Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025, Old Memories Are Getting More Persistent offers some of Iosif Király’s favorite themes – synchronicity, symmetry, the feeling of déjà vu or false recognition. Other artists exhibiting are Magda Hueckel, Grzegorz Wełnicki, Łukasz Rusznica, Jerzy Grzegorski, Igor Omulecki, Bartłomiej Talaga, Katarzyna Serkowska and Bartosz Kałużny Nachtigal.

Among the points of the program are four premieres of the latest projects of Polish artists, the first exhibition about photography for children in Poland, over 30 exhibitions showing a cross-section of Polish and world contemporary photography, and Photo-Match, i.e. a completely different portfolio review, concerts, workshops, film screenings and educational activities.

The Main Program will include exhibitions of authors such as Mexican artist Diego Moreno. On the other hand, the Open Program provides an overview of current phenomena in photography and a look at topics of interest to photographers. Each year, the jury strives to prepare a coherent but diverse selection that best reflects currently relevant narratives. Among this year’s submissions committed projects dealing with socially important issues such as migration, climate change, identity, roots, conflicts, and minorities were present, but there were also many very personal stories. From among 1210 projects, the jury selected works by artists Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella, Marcel Top, Peter Pflügler, Adrien Selbert, Tomasz Jan Kawecki and Camilla de Maffei.

The curatorial part of the festival will be dedicated to the process of freeing and liberation. The artists invited to the 2024 edition will present works that take up the challenge of breaking free from outdated socio-political structures, breaking free from traumatic past and inner pressures, as well as breaking free from visual contexts and boundaries that seem to limit our perception. 

In the process of creating the program, Fotofestiwal has also been doing its best to free itself of curatorial boundaries and work with the loose and broad idea that they treat more as a patron of this year’s edition rather than a title or a strict theme, as they hope this will also be a new and refreshing experience for their audience.