Surrealist Photographic Experiments

In the first part of the session, we’ll visit the exhibition and take a closer look at the photographs, collages, and photomontages that became a powerful tool for social and political engagement for the Surrealists. We’ll discover how artists such as John Heartfield, Kati Horna, Jindřich Heisler, and Claude Cahun used the camera to expose the mechanisms of oppression and the supposedly rational language of Western civilization. We will analyze how these artists combined chance and spontaneity with radical opposition to authoritarian power. We will also discuss how, in the face of historical upheavals, art became a tangible form of resistance for them.

 

After visiting the exhibition, we’ll move on to a hands-on workshop. We’ll combine the language of surrealist collage and photomontage with the old cyanotype technique!

We’ll take advantage of the extraordinary light-sensitive properties of this method and expose compositions that we’ll build ourselves from fragments of old photos, texts, and ready-made templates. In this way, we’ll create absolutely unique, monochromatic, and expressive photographic prints.

Piotr Lewandowski – MSN educator, visual artist, cultural animator. A graduate of Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Photography at the University of Arts in Poznań. He works with photography, video, installation, and performance. His art explores themes related to movement, space, interpersonal relationships, and queerness.