Anew

Long-term documentary on Lower Silesia – a territory that became a part of Poland after WW2 – and identities that formed there since.

Anew is a documentary project about the contemporary landscape of Lower Silesia – a land that passed into Polish hands after World War II. As part of the so-called Recovered Territories, the region has experienced the intersection of over a thousand years of history and the need to rewrite its identity, largely as part of an organised, propaganda effort. Settled by repatriates and migrants, multicultural Lower Silesia quickly became an important industrial center of the Polish People's Republic, and over time, also an important center of resistance against the communist government. A hotbed of cultural movements, Wrocław – the capital of the region – was demographically the youngest city in Poland. The changes of 1989 erased much of the industrial heritage, once again forcing a change in the narrative.
Contemporary Lower Silesia is less a single narrative than a stage where multiple, often contradictory scenarios of history have played out. For decades, the region has been at once an economic resource, a symbolic trophy, a question mark, and a provisional home for waves of newcomers. The Millennium Flood of 1997, catalysed a sense of belonging by uniting inhabitants in defence of their city – a rare moment where all the narratives converged.
Lower Silesia is a region where identity has been continuously scripted and rescripted – where each generation stages a new scenario of how to inhabit the past, and how to imagine the future. Anew investigates this tangle of micro-histories. What is it now? What is the sum of histories in the plural?

Anew draws on over a decade of fieldwork and archival research, combining photography and oral history. Structured as a non-linear narrative inspired by paragraph novels, it invites readers to assemble their own path through the region’s fragmented memoryscape. The project was awarded the 2024 Young Poland scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the President of Wrocław’s Artistic Grant, and the Pix.House Talent of the Year award in the Scholar category – all three supporting parts of the fieldwork, which is now completed. In 2025, Anew was also being presented as part of the Futures Photography platform, and would be exhibited in May 2026 as a part of Kraków Photomonth main program.