Showing the “Record”
A discussion with Karol Hordziej and Ulrich Pohlmann

  • Showing the “Record”

    Zofia Rydet, from the series "Sociological Record", 1978-1990, courtesy of Zofia Rydet Foundation

We would like to invite you to another meeting in the series titled “Between old objectivity and naive conceptualism”. This time with the participation of Karol Hordziej and Ulrich Pohlman.

How can you show a project as big as Zofia Rydet's “Sociological Record”? A project that has never been shown in its entirety - or in a way that would satisfy the artist. Moreover, most of the photographs included in the "Record” have never been developed,existing only as negatives.

This context raises a question about possible ways of working with such archival materials, but also about the practical, aesthetic and ethical limits of such work. Should we, in such a situation, only work with the prints developed by Zofia Rydet, as some suggest, or rather - as the curators from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw did - study the whole body of work and make a new selection, develop new prints? What does that mean for the Record as a collection of photographs, but also as one artist's project? What is the status of the new prints and what will happen to them in the future? The co-curator of the Zofia Rydet. Record, 1978-1990 exhibition and Ulrich Pohlmann, the director of the Photography Museum at the Munich Stadtmuseum will try to find answers to these and other questions.
 

Karol Hordziej - curator, lecturer, culture manager. Artistic director of the Cracow Photomonth Festival between 2004 and 2013. He is currently processing the works of Jan Dziaczkowski and Zofia Rydet's “Sociological Record”. He regularly works with the Foundation for Visual Arts.

Ulrich Pohlmann - photography exhibition historian, director of the Photography Museum at the Munich Stadtmuseum. Curator of numerous exhibitions, from the Barbizon school to Stefan Moses, from photographic albums of German World War II soldiers to Photokina exhibitions. He also worked with male nudes and female photography. He curated a large Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz exhibition. Author of numerous texts for catalogs and collections.

See also:

Other events from that cycle: