Conversations about photography: Józef Robakowski

The conversation with the artist and art historian Józef Robakowski will be devoted to the projects “Living Gallery 1” and “Living Gallery 2” — film experiments based on short, half-minute statements by artists of different disciplines.

The starting point for the conversation will be “Living Gallery 1” from 1975, a film that for nearly 50 years remained inaccessible to the public, and today returns in conjunction with the contemporary “Living Gallery 2”, prepared with the participation of currently active creators. In the first project, Natalia LL, Jerzy Berieś, Andrzej Lachowicz, Andrzej Partum and Paweł Kwek speak. “Živa Galeria 2" features Karolina Breguła, Cecylia Malik, Jadwiga Sawicka, Karolina Wiktor, Karolina Wojtas and Jakub Woynarowski, among others.

We will look at the idea of independent artistic expression and the formula of a short film etude, which — as Robakowski notes — overtook the structure of online rolls that we know today. The juxtaposition of the two works will also be an opportunity to look at the dialogue between different generations of artists and how the ways of telling about their own artistic practice are changing.

During the meeting we will learn about the sources of the formal concept of both projects dating back to Katarzyna Kobro's “Chain Composition” and the avant-garde ideas developed by Kobro and Władysław Strzeminski. The meeting will be an opportunity to talk about the continuity of artistic experimentation, the changing ways of communicating art and how avant-garde ideas can return in new contexts.

Józef Robakowski — artist, art historian, author of films, photographic cycles, video recordings, drawings, installations, objects, conceptual projects and initiator of many important events and multimedia artistic actions. Curator and owner of the Exchange Gallery.

He was born on February 20, 1939 in Poznań. He studied art history and museology at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and at the Faculty of Cinematography at PWSFTvit in Łódź, where from 1970 to 1981 he was a lecturer and head of the Department of Photography and Visual Advertising. In 1995 he returned to work at this university, where he currently runs a multimedia activities studio. Co-founder of artistic groups undertaking experimental activities, including OKO (1960), STKF PĘTLA (1960—1966), ZERO-61 (1961—1969), KRĄG (1965—1967) and the Warsztat Forma Filmform and Television Group Stacja Ł (1991—1992), founded in 1970 in Łódź. In 2013, in the Department of Modern Art of the National Museum in Gdańsk, his solo exhibition “The Essence of Ideas” was held, curated by Maria Szymańska-Korejwo.