Krakow PhotoMonth

I know that Marta mentioned Krakow PhotoMonth before in the blog but here is more specific information about this event.

This year Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were invited to guest-curate Krakow PhotoMonth- a photography festival that has been continuously on for 9 years.

The festival takes place across the whole city, including the National Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum etc...

This year the curators have opted for a strategy rather than a theme: we have invited writers and artists to collaborate with a specific goal; to invent a fictional character - an artists who can be either contemporary or historical - and to then produce a piece of work / body of work in the name of this invented persona.

Two authors lead to this theme: the first is Fernando Pessoa, who wrote much of his ouvre under multiple, alternative identities - not so much pseudonyms or alias' but what he termed heteronyms - invented personalities with detailed biographies and interweaving histories. The second is Roberto Bolano, and specifically his book Nazi Literature in the Americas. It's an anthology of conservative, basically fascist authors, all of whom are invented by Bolano.

We have invited to produce commissioned works by:

Gabriel Orozco, David Goldblatt, Alec Soth, Matthew Buckingham, Johan Grimonprez, Jeremy Deller, Marine Hugonnier, Andro Wekua, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Lisa Brice, Roe Ethridge, Emily Wardill, Celine Condorelli, Beatrice Gibson, Polly Braden, Elizabeth McAlpine, Godfried Donkor, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Clare Strand and Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.

Collaborating with the following writers:

Siddhartha Mukherjee, Lynne Tillman, Ivan Vladislavic, Brad Zellar, Fernando Pessoa, Jennifer Higgie, Clare Carolin, Sean O'Toole, John Haskell, Adrian Rifkin, Avery Gordon, Brian Dillon, David Campany, Helen Dewitt, Ekow Eshun, Alexander Düttman, Gordon MacDonald, Brown and Bri and Gemma Sieff.

The second part of the festival will take place at the prestigious Bunkier Sztuki Museum of Contempoarary Art which will take form of a survey show. This show will include works by artists who have either used the strategy of the heteronym to make their work or works by artists who explore the territory of the surrogate self, the alter ego, the disguise or alias. We are interested in works that focus on the idea of the artist inhabiting different personae as part of an interrogation about identity. This show will include work by Marcel Duchamp, Walid Raad, Roni Horn, Brian O'Doherty, Simon Fujiwara, Joe Scanlan, William Kentridge, Richard Prince, Renzo Martens, Peter Weibel, Olivier Castell, Reena Spaulings, Nate Tate, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Claude Cahun, Claire Fontaine, Salvador Dali, the Otolith Group, Wayne Barker, Roger Ballen, Gillian Wearing and many more.

The festival opens on May, 13th and will be on until June, 12th.

In addition to that you can visit: http://www.photomonth.com/index.php/en/page/1/aktualnosci.html

Also ryanair.com might be helpful as they do cheap flights to Krakow.

Hope to see you there!