Echoes of the Unseen at the PALACE Museum in Zakppane, Poland

More images below.

Curator's Małgorzata Taraszkiewicz-Zwolicka text: 

Exhibition Echoes of the Unseen

VALENTYN ODNOVIUN

The first temporary exhibition in the newly opened branch of the Tatra Museum, the Palace Museum, presents works directly related to reflection on the history of oppression in Europe. It is all the more important because it was created by Valentyn Odnoviun, a Ukrainian artist whose country is waging a defensive fight against the aggressor.

The presented photographs were created mainly in Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Germany. These photographs are part of an unseen history, a scattered collection of traces of political violence preserved in places that once enabled its occurrence, such as the Palace building. During World War II, the headquarters of the Gestapo was in Zakopane. At the Palace Museum, the artist will also create a work referring to its most dramatic history, the Nazi occupation.

In his creative practice, Odnoviun consistently searches for places – witnesses of violence and analyzes their appearance through photographic recording. It transfers this image into the sphere of aesthetic creation and allows for a new interpretation, which encourages the viewer to reflect. In the series devoted to the spaces of state control over man, the artist looks for frames close to abstraction. In the Surveillance series, these are views of peepholes in the doors of prison cells of former political prisons in the Baltic countries, Poland, Germany and Ukraine. The main task of the State Security Agency was to spy on citizens, fight dissidents and eliminate them as a threat to the regime. The same places were used for similar purposes by various oppressive systems. To this day, many of them function as prisons; some, for example, in Gdańsk, are still detention centres. The project presents post-communist history through aesthetic images with deep meaning. Fragments of cells and wall fragments seen through the peephole resemble entirely different spaces, closer to cosmic frames from astronomical telescopes than to places of enslavement. It is similar to the works from the series Horizons, where horizontal light slits evoke associations with a better world. However, they present photographs of light reflections on stairs leading to the basements of former Gestapo, NKVD and later UB headquarters and prisons located in various Polish cities, which very often contained individual prison cells, interrogation rooms and rooms where executions were carried out between 1944 and 1956. State security agencies, such as the NKVD in the USSR and the UB (Security Department of the Polish People's Republic) created their offices and headquarters throughout Poland, very often using the same buildings previously used by the Gestapo. In a sparse, minimalist form, the artist recalls the unwanted legacy of wartime execution sites about the common experience of communism in Eastern Europe. The photographed places include, among others, stairs to the Gestapo isolation cell, and later the Security Service Prison for Women in Łódź, the MBP Detention Centre and the NKVD Headquarters in Warsaw, and the staircase to the Gestapo prison cell section, and later the Security Service prison in Gdańsk. In his works devoted to the Warsaw Uprising, PW44 Odnoviun simultaneously mobilizes the viewer to reflect on history, human nature, and the restriction of freedom. Through his work, he gives voice to unseen participants: victims and witnesses of the always violent penitentiary system.

The exhibition is the second extended version of the project, which premiered at the National Museum in Gdańsk in September 2023.

Valentyn Odnoviun (1987), a Ukrainian living in Vilnius, graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Photography and Media Art (MA) and Theory and History of Art (MA). He studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Poland and Germany. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation in art theory and history at the Lithuanian Institute of Cultural Studies. He has received awards at festivals worldwide, including New Zealand, the USA and many European countries. Odnoviun's work is a visual reflection of the common, difficult communist heritage of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland.

Polish version: https://muzeumtatrzanskie.pl/echa-niewidzianych/

The exhibition will be on display at the Palace Museum, ul. T. Chałubińskiego 7, until February 28, 2025.