Krakow Photomonth and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow MOCAK invite audiences to the solo exhibition Annette Kelm – Speak, Volumes. The exhibition marks the first chapter of the main programme of this year’s edition of Krakow Photomonth, dedicated to Germany and Polish–German relations at a time of crisis in established narratives, declining trust, and resurgent populisms.
Annette Kelm is a German visual artist whose photographic practice examines the history of objects and their ideological entanglements. At Krakow Photomonth, she will present works from two series: Die Bücher and Travertinsäulen Recyclingpark Neckartal.
Unreal Estate: On Borders, Entanglements, and Unfinished Histories
The three-chapter Main Program, titled Unreal Estate, merges various perspectives while avoiding simplified divisions. The participating artists work in hybrid, research-based ways, intertwining images, texts, and material experiments to challenge the status of the tangible and explore the essence of memory. Faced with the displacement of post-1989 narratives of reconciliation by new discourses of distrust, artists return to the history of displacement, shifting borders, and collective memory – issues only intensified by recent events in Belarus and Ukraine.
Unreal Estate aims to create a space for reflection and the work of imagination – essential conditions for envisioning possible futures.
We invite you to examine Poland’s relationship with its western neighbor and the cultural, ideological, and geopolitical ties shaping Central Europe. A key concern is the afterimage of the border that once divided Poland and Germany, mirroring the global East–West split and Germany’s own internal division. In an era of revisionist politics and renewed imperial fantasies, the significance of borders demands re-examination.
Unreal Estates
Chapter 1: Speak, Volumes
Artist: Annette Kelm
MOCAK, 6.03–14.06.2026
In the photographic series Die Bücher, Annette Kelm depicts the covers of approximately one hundred volumes—first or early editions of books that were banned, blacklisted, and, in some cases, publicly burned by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Kelm presents each book frontally, against a neutral white background, evenly lit and casting a soft shadow. One might describe them as portraits: the cover becomes a face, and the photograph itself a persona, embodying the author, the graphic designer, and the content of the book. In this context, Annette Kelm invites us to consider books as objects of a distinct kind—objects imbued with agency, capable of carrying ideas across generations and cataclysms.
In the series Travertinsäulen Recyclingpark Neckartal, Kelm photographed a row of travertine columns on the outskirts of Stuttgart, situated between what is now a recycling facility and a waste-to-energy plant. The columns were commissioned in 1936 by the City of Berlin at the Lauster quarry in Stuttgart as part of a monument to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, intended for Adolf Hitler Square (today’s Theodor-Heuss-Platz). The project for the Reich capital designed by Albert Speer was halted by the Nazis’ wartime defeats, and fourteen fifteen-metre-high columns still stand at the site today, surrounded by the postmodern architecture of a waste incineration plant. By photographing the columns in their present surroundings, Kelm allows these “antiquities” to release the ideas inscribed in them nearly a hundred years ago.
Annette Kelm (b. 1975) is a German visual artist born in Stuttgart, who lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In her photographic practice, she explores the socio-cultural history of objects, the relationships between materiality, image, and ideology, and the political dimension of visual forms. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Camera Austria Prize (2015) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie – Audience Award (2009). The exhibition at MOCAK will be her first solo presentation in Poland.
Curatorial Team: Krzysztof Pijarski and Anna Voswinckel.
Krakow Photomonth 2026 | SAVE THE DATE: 14.05 – 14.06.2026