The BWA Contemporary art gallery

Ruda Śląska, Kraków, Göteborg, Stockholm – these are the places delineating the boundaries of Joanna Helander’s autobiographical pact. In her work, the artist has chosen the strategy of constant movement as a method of building a story not only about her experiences, but also about the dilemmas characteristic of her generation. Her photographic series, films made together with Bo Persson, books published in Swedish, letters and memoirs not only form a single story about the fate of a family from a small town in a corner of Eastern Europe, but are also a multi-threaded record of the process of discovering secrets passed on from generation to generation, which become universalised in a metaphysical order. Here, the stakes are perversely set by History itself. At the moment of her interrogation by the Kraków secret police, the origin of her family from her father’s side became an argument in the verbal quarrels between the officer and the rebellious student of Romance Philology. In fact, Helander had uncovered a closely guarded secret when she clipped a protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia from the magazine La Pologne together with her sister and a friend. Putting together boxes in the women’s prison in Myślenice for several long and uncertain months marked the horizon of a girl who regarded learning a foreign language as a pass into the world of dreams.

Having been sentenced for defiance, she was released with a broken life story and could only embark on her next journey, this time to Sweden. It was decided by chance. A new place, people and learning the language from scratch became her daily routine, punctuated by letters from Poland. Father, who, in the addressee-sender convention, inscribes the wartime fate of his family, his own views, and unrealised longings and tells of his struggle with fate, history and happiness, remained in Ruda Śląska. Joanna Helander, looking for a job in her new country, takes up photography studies – the abstracted language of images, each time open to a context of meanings, becomes her new tool of choice for communication. In 1976, she was able to come to Poland for the first time; with a camera in hand, she visits her hometown and her places. The fascination of the newcomer mixes with the longing of the one who left. A double mechanism of vision occurs here: the camera extends the gaze of the photographer, whose point of view becomes the observer’s perspective. The resulting images, like mirrors, show a reality whose presence seems to be a temporary illusion, as the observer is burdened by the need to leave.

The selected images fall into a sequence of motifs of interest to Joanna Helander, and thereby, the reasons she wanted to leave the stuffiness of her home town disappear in favour of the sensitivity of an observer curious about untold stories. This gives rise to her creative strategy, consistently pursued to this day in series, reportages, documentaries and films seeking answers to questions about the fate of loved ones, friends, and people whose profiles have momentarily surfaced during archival searches. In this perspective, identity becomes a reflective project. The stories told, with their concrete anchoring in the past, contain the potential of discovering what the future holds.

The exhibition prepared by the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery reveals Joanna Helander’s photo-film imaginarium, co-created with Bo Persson. Here, the ontological relationship between the media serves as a pretext to extracting the five-decades worth of motifs, consistently present and developed in the artist’s work and continued or concluded in such films as: “Eighth Day Theatre” (“Teater åttonde dagen”, 1992), “Returning” (“Aterkomster”, 1994), “The Twins from Kraków” (“Tvillingarna fran Kraków”, 1994), “Waltz with Miłosz” (2011), “Watching the Moon at Night” (2016). The works presented at the exhibition tell the stories of departures, returns, friendships, and fascinations. They also offer a reflection on the mechanism of memory and oblivion, a documentary, in which the viewer’s tenderness or – as Stanisław Barańczak wrote – love “never degenerates into easy sentimentalism, and criticism never turns into a simple gesture of condemnation.”

Ada Grzelewska

Curator
Ada Grzelewska

Curatorial collaboration
Marek Zieliński, Marek Kuś

Opening of the exhibition – 29th November | Friday | 6 pm
The opening will be translated into sign language.
Opening with no entrance fee, then according to the BWA Gallery offer.

The exhibition open until 26th January 2025.

Joanna Helander, Second Sojourn in Sweden, from the series Twins from Kraków, 1988 © Joanna Helander

JOANNA HELANDER
Photographer, director of documentaries, author and translator. A renowned documentarian of the daily life of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), an artist who has produced film and photographic portraits of representatives of Polish and Swedish cultures. She studied Romance Philology at the Jagiellonian University, where in 1968 she actively participated in the democratic opposition. In 1971, she emigrated to Sweden. There, she graduated from photographic studies, published her first album “The Woman” (1978) and a story about her Silesia family, an album “Gerard K. – Letters from Poland” (1986), and received the prestigious Photo of the Year award (1983). Joanna Helander is the author of the Polish-Swedish book “Gdyby ta Polka była w Szwecji” [If this Polish Woman Were in Sweden] (1999) about the Nobel Prize awarded to Wisława Szymborska, the album “Women Looking. Photos 1976–2012” (2019), and – with Arkadiusz Gola – the album “Unknown Station” (2019), in which photographs are accompanied by Ryszard Krynicki’s poems. In collaboration with Bo Persson, she produced original documentaries and numerous poetic slideshows, combining fragments of films, photos, and music. Decorated with the Cross of Freedom and Solidarity, medals from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague, and the Senate of the Czech Republic Parliament. Honorary Resident of Ruda Śląska. Lives and works in Göteborg and Kraków.

BO PERSSON
Swedish film and theatre director, plays and script writer. He spent many years in Rome and Paris, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and film. Since the early 1970s, he has created artistic projects on the subject of Central Europe, the conflict between a person and the state, memory and oblivion in societies ruled by totalitarian regimes. In 1987, with Joanna Helander, he launched an independent film studio Kino Koszyk, situated in Göteborg, which specialises in creative documentaries, such as “Eighth Day Theatre” (“Teater åttonde dagen”, 1992), “Returning” (“Aterkomster”, 1994), “The Twins from Kraków” (“Tvillingarna fran Kraków”, 1994), “Waltz with Miłosz” (2011), “Watching the Moon at Night” (2016). In collaboration with Joanna Helander, he translated many Polish writers into Swedish, including a collection of Ryszard Krynicki’s poems “Planeta Fantasmagoria” [Planet Phantasmagoria], and Władysław Bartoszewski’s memoirs “Warto być przyzwoitym“ [It’s Worth Being Decent]. A laureate of the Gloria Artis award from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2016) and – with Joanna Helander – a special prize awarded by Władysław Bartoszewski for promoting the Polish culture abroad (2001). Lives and works in Stockholm.

33. Ars Cameralis Festival
Love | 6 – 30 November 2024
arscameralisfestiwal.pl