|
From 13 May to 12 June you’ve had an opportunity to participate in one of Poland’s most important cultural events! And, as it turns out, in the world, too. The festival is gaining an ever wider group of devotees further afield than just Poland!
This year we focused on an experiment which this year's curators, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, feared would fail. The invited writers had no easy task – first to create a biography for a character, which the invited artists then had to inhabit and, discarding their own style and views, create the works to be presented at the Festival in Krakow. As it turned out, the idea, not only succeeded at the level of implementation, but was also astonishing in its level of conceptual thinking.
We had the chance to host such art world personalities as Brett Rogers, director of The Photographers’ Gallery, Charlotte Cotton (Creative Director of Media Space, set up as a result of collaboration between the Science Museum and the National Media Museum in the UK, expected to open in 2012 in London, and previously curator of photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum and head of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), as well as photographer Roger Ballen.
We hosted journalists from major art magazines. During recent weeks we have been visited by reviewers from such powerful print media as “Neue Zurcher Zeitung”, “Dazed Digital”, “Kunstbeeld magazine”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Monopol”, “Le Repubblica”, “The Art Newspaper”, “Modern Painters”, “Art Review”, “British Journal of Photography”, and the “Financial Times”.
As every year, local and national media covered the course of the Festival on an ongoing basis. Listeners to Polish Radio’s Third Programme, readers of “Gazeta Wyborcza”, Interia or “Newsweek” not only read about the Photomonth in Krakow programme, but also profiles of the curators and artists. Dozens of exhibitions and accompanying events once again brought together thousands of viewers, thus demonstrating the growing role of the Photomonth in Krakow.
This is what’s been said about us:
“ALIAS in Krakow is unimaginably good. Broomberg and Chanarin have raised the bar for the curators of other photography festivals."
1000 Words Photography Magazine
“ALIAS, curated by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, is one of the strangest, most enigmatic and creative exhibitions that I’ve ever seen (generally I don’t talk about events which I’m even minimally involved with, but this one is worth it)."
Jennifer Higgie, Frieze magazine editorial blog
“This year’s festival has extended the boundaries of what photography is."
Dziennik Polski |
