The theme of this year’s Fotofestiwal is Hope, an edition that will bring together once again, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. On this topic will be exhibited projects focusing on action, cooperation and faith in the power of change. Additional venues include the hosting of the programs of Month of Photography in Minsk and Odesa Photo Days, Festivals that couldn’t take part in their home countries; new works by Zbigniew Libera; as well as photographs of the 1980s’ stars in a pop story about the legendary AREA club in New York. To name just a few. The Festival will take place in Łódź between 15th and 25th of June.

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Fotofestiwal, the International Festival of Photography in Łódź, will take place for the twenty-second time in post-industrial spaces across the city. In the Festival Centre at Art_Inkubator, exhibitions from the Hope program will be presented. These are international projects that encourage us to look closer at inspiring people, bold artists, powerful communities and the actions they take in defiance of common, fatalistic narratives about our reality. “The words of American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit have inspired us: hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope,” say Krzysztof Candrowicz and Marta Szymańska, who are in charge of the Festival program. “We have invited curators and artists to work with us and create seven group and individual exhibitions. Most of them have been designed especially for the 22nd Fotofestiwal and depict various forms of resistance, support, and cooperation in Eastern and Western Europe, South America, and Middle East.”

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In one exhibition, photographer Nadège Mazars will tell us the story of the indigenous tribes of the Amazon who declared war on the Coca-Cola corporation. Oro verde, by the duo Florencia Grisanti and Tito Gonzalez, focuses on a rebellion started by Mexican women that resulted in the expulsion of one of many dangerous drug cartels from the town of Cherán. Acclaimed visual artist Ursula Biemann will present the outcome of her travel and research, from Greenland to South America, and propose a new way of talking about the global climate crisis. Ugo Woatzi, whose works will be presented in the group exhibition titled On the Verge, will invite the Festival guests to celebrate a wide range of different facets of masculinity; while Rami Hara’s works, in the group exhibition In Our Hands, underline marginalized communities in multicultural cosmopolitan european societies, by placing a special emphasis on their outside contributions. Whereas Pauline Hisbacqs’ project will evoke the history of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, in which female protesters used singing to express their resistance when the police approached them and to demonstrate their opposition against the concept of the post-Cold War world domination by the United States.

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The exhibitions that have been put together to reflect this year’s Festival theme are art projects that change the way we look at the contemporary world and prove that even in the times of the deepest darkness and in the cracks of uncertainty, we can develop some hidden positive scripts.

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The program will also include several exhibitions that are not related to the main theme, including AREA: ART ON THE DANCEFLOOR. Warhol, Basquiat and Co. Volker Hinz’s large-format, dynamic and daring photographs will invite us to learn about the history of the nightclub which would light up New York’s Lower Manhattan in the 1980s. The club used to undergo a spectacular transformation every six weeks, and its visitors were invited to dress up to match ever new mottos such as “Food”, “Fashion” or “Faith”. In these photographs, we will rediscover some of the stars of the world art scene of that time, including Warhol, Basquiat, Madonna and Grace Jones, right next to every man transforming into someone else for one spectacular night.

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The premiere of new photographs by Zbigniew Libera, created especially for this edition of Fotofestiwal, will be a strong highlight of the program. “The exhibition at Galeria Wschodnia marks the artist’s return to Łódź, a city to which his work has been linked since he became a part of the Kultura Zrzuty group,” says Daniel Muzyczuk, curator of the exhibition. “Another important aspect of this return is the location. After all, Wschodnia is the legendary space of the independent gallery movement and the city’s last non-commercial art gallery established in the early 1980s.”

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Another major solo exhibition will present the works of Grzegorz Przyborek, a Łódź-based artist, much appreciated in Poland and abroad. It will be a review of his entire artistic output, starting from the first steps in Łódź and in Arles, France, to his most recent works, which have not been shown anywhere yet. The retrospective exhibition titled Silence will be presented at the City Art Gallery in Łódź – Art Propaganda Centre [Miejska Galeria Sztuki w Łodzi – Ośrodek Propagandy Sztuki].

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“This year, too, we have invited the curators of our two friend photography festivals, Month of Photography in Minsk (Belarus) and Odesa Photo Days (Ukraine), to collaborate with us on the program,” says Krzysztof Candrowicz. “Both those events cannot be organised in their respective countries due to political reasons, so we are preparing a huge space in the heart of post-industrial Łódź, the OFF Piotrkowska complex to present the works of Belarusian and Ukrainian artists, among others.”

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Moreover, Fotofestiwal’s Open Program offers an overview of the most interesting phenomena in contemporary photography. It includes six projects selected by the international jury from thousands of submissions from all over the world. This showcase - a truly impressive visual set of projects - touches upon a variety of issues: the reality of the Persian Gulf countries, man’s attitude towards water in Sierra Leone, and the life and problems of the coastal communities in Colombia.

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A special Talent Futures slideshow will feature projects that are close to contemporary Europe: Ihar Hancharuk’s research into the phenomenon of military propaganda that has been present in Belarus for years now, Lisa Bukreyeva’s and Marcin Kruk’s projects on the war in Ukraine, as well as Kinga Wrona’s series of photographs about the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma. The slideshow and group exhibition titled On the Verge, a part of the Hope Program, have been created thanks to Fotofestiwal’s collaboration with Futures Photography, an international platform connecting almost twenty photographic institutions from all around Europe.

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During the ten days of the Festival, the audience will be also invited to attend presentations of photography books and exhibitions organised by partner galleries, including a group exhibition dedicated to Bogdan Konopka at the Gallery of the Łódź Photographic Society (ŁTF), and Chris Niedenthal’s retrospective exhibition made together with the Museum of the City of Łódź.  

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As always, the program will also include film screenings, discussions and concerts.

A good opportunity to visit Łódź at its best.

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Fotofestiwal – International Festival of Photography in Łódź

15-25 June 2023

www.fotofestiwal.com

Subsidised by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund.

Organised by: Fundacja Edukacji Wizualnej [Foundation for Visual Education]

Co-organisers: Łódzkie Centrum Wydarzeń [Łódź Events Centre], Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Fabryka Sztuki [Art Factory] in Łódź,

Festival Centres: Art_Inkubator, OFF Piotrkowska,

Main Partners of the Festival: Month of Photography in Minsk, Odesa Photo Days, EPP Futures Photography with the funding from the European Union’s Creative Europe Programme, University of Lodz, Film School in Łódź, Strzemiński Academy of  Fine Arts in Łódź,

Festival Sponsor: Rossmann

Partners of the Odesa Photo Days and Minsk Month of Photography exhibitions: EU4Culture, Goethe Institute