Anna Beata Bohdziewicz: Photodiary / Photodiary
opening by Marek Grygiel, Anna Beata Bohdziewicz, István Halas
18th Sept 2014
open 9th Oct, in the Liget Gallery

styczeń 2014 - Wieżowców przybywa. Ale Pałac Kultury dominuje! / January 2014 - More and more skyscrapers. But the Palace of Culture still dominates!

Anna Beata Bohdziewicz: Futurum, Turning into the Present and the Past*


  The first Photodiary exhibitions, where I showed all the photos (nearly six hundred in West Berlin in 1985!), were very easy to do. Arranged chronologically, one photo after another, possibly in a single line (with only censorship interventions distorting the sequence). However, it soon turned out that there were too many photos and I had to make a selection. That was still quite easy. I simply “cut off’” the successive stretches of time. But that soon proved insufficient too. People asked me to show pictures from longer periods, changes in Poland started accelerating, images from a few years back suddenly became “historic” and the matter of choosing some and rejecting others became one of interpretation and judgement. That choice was always “discretionary”, as it were, depending on all kinds of factors such as current events, my mood at the time, the weather or my current aesthetic fascinations... So you could say I showed a different work every time. But it was always ruled by chronology. And suddenly time became looped. Contemporary events cause a strong sense of dejá vu. Has everything happened before? No, that’s impossible! The future seems more and more ominous, more and more unpredictable.
    There are still many surprises in store for us. And the past? Has it really gone? Or does it continue in us as the present? And the present? It doesn’t exist, everything happening too quickly.
    The thread of time on which I’ve been arduously stringing the Photodiary pictures for thirty two years now has broken and everything’s gotten mixed up. I pull photos, almost at random, out from folders and binders. I hang them, without any obvious plan, on the walls. Some seem mutually attractive, while others repel each other. The work has freed itself of the author. Finally!

Warsaw, January 2012

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*/ Hanna Kirchner, Nałkowska albo życie pisane, WAB 2011, p. 793.

the exhibition was supported by Polish Institute, Budapest / fotoTAPETA, Warsaw