Invited guest: Mikołaj Grynberg

Mikołaj Grynberg:
I’m currently focused on this project.
I have some photo-cycles from the past.
I’ve made several exhibitions. I’m having
2-3 exhibitions in the year time. I’m photographing
people for 18 years now. All that you can name a portrait.

Two years ago Mikolaj Grynberg started working on his project Many Women.
It started with a series of pictures of various women form the artist’s closest
circles, titled Many Women-Warsaw. The photos were exhibited at a train
station in Rio de Janeiro. Next to them the artist set up an ad hoc photo
atelier, to which he would invite female passers-by. They thus became
subjects for the next photo-series. The brasilian even was a happening,
the spectators were random passers-by, journalists and invited guests.
The Central De Brasil show lead to creating another exhibit,
Many Women – Rio, very different form the Polish sequence as it was
a photo-record of random and unique encounters. Mikolaj Grynberg decided to continue and expand his project. In urban
spaces all around the world the artist repeats the scenario form
Rio de Janeiro: he shows the exhibit Many Women – Warsaw and
at the same time invites random local women to be photographed
on the spot. Within last four months Grynberg has finished a few
next, very successful parts of this project in Kiev /Ukraine/,
Mexico City /Mexico/ and Lima /Peru/. Many Women is a testimony of emotions that occur during a unique
20 minute encounter between the artist and each of the photographed
women. Time from being noticed in the crowd to exposing the last of
12 film frames. Teasing curiosity, fascination, shyness, joy, pride,
melancholy, even anger and desire captured in a black and white
frame. Universal emotions, where geographical and political borders
vanish. The photos are made in b&w and are the lith prints.

invited by Joanna Kinowska

up to you: we're looking for a strong support to realize this
project in Sweden. Any ideas? The media patron of the project
is "Wysokie obcasy" magazine and the main support is from
the Promotional Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.

media

gruppo F inbox: Walter, Shanghai, China

Close but far away

the loud silence

If you take a car.
Drive for ten hours to the north from Stockholm.
Then take on your cross country skies.
And ski for about one hour, mostly up hill.
Then cross some creeks,
pass some scooter trails,
some sleeping bears.

If you do that.
And you are still alive.
You might end up in this place.

Here where the silence is more present than anywhere else.
Loud even.

Here it is just traces of civilisation
It is almost like one of those diseases,
one of those where the body is repelling a part of the body.

This is the repelled part.
A lost limb.

The place where our civilisation said:
–Hey, no one could possibly want to live there anyway…
We outsource it to somewhere closer.
And call it Skansen or whatever.
Then we have it within reach.
Safe and packaged.
Served.

But just like the sandwiches wrapped in plastic.
It doesn’t taste quite as good.
Not quite the same.

So every year
I come here, by car and skies.
Visiting the repelled part.

And I listen to the loud silence.

Photos and thoughts: christofer grandin

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