Chapters

Chapter 1: Speak, Volumes (MOCAK)

Participating artist: Annette Kelm

Chapter 2: A Possible Arrangement (Bunkier Sztuki)

Participating artists: Bownik, Fungi (Phuong Tran Minh), Karolina Gembara, Eiko Grimberg, Jonas Höschl, Susanne Keichel, Arwed Messmer, Ines Schaber, Arne Schmitt, Paweł Starzec, Andrzej Steinbach, Tytus Szabelski-Różniak

Chapter 3: Shifting Strata (Potocki Palace)

Participating artists: Jonas Höschl, Jadwiga Janowska, Susanne Kriemann, Anna Orłowska, Wojciech Wilczyk, Tobias Zielony

I inherited an exquisite simulacrum—the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate—and this proved a splendid training for the endurance of later losses.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

The thematic focus of Krakow Photomonth 2026 is Poland’s western neighbor, and the cultural, ideological, and geopolitical relations between our countries. What we are interested in is the idea of society as a site and potentiality of change. The concept of “unreal estate” originates from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, where he writes about his mother showing him “time marks”—moments of natural beauty (a bird’s footprints, the color of leaves), but also objects and places imbued with stories (the linden tree where his father had proposed to her)—as things worth remembering, holding close to one’s heart. At the same time, it bespeaks the literal loss of his family’s immense assets, their “real estate,” in the wake of the Russian Revolution. And yet his account is not nostalgic—the images he evokes are not part of a world he wishes to return to, but building blocks of an identity in the process of constant rewriting, a place where the factual meets the potential. To us, “unreal estate” seems to aptly grasp the condition of our region, Central Europe, and of Germany, which we see as a country “in between”—between states, its liminal status practically obscured today.

Central Europe is a region defined less by its topography than by its existential anxiety, a consequence of living in a “zone of small nations” where statehood has been precarious, and history experienced mostly as catastrophe. Unlike the well-established nation-states of Western Europe, whose borders and identities have historically possessed a degree of continuity and permanence, the states of Central Europe are a territory where borders have repeatedly shifted above the heads of populations, and where the very existence of a state has rarely been a given. And while Germany’s ambitions of dominating Mitteleuropa—from Friedrich Naumann’s “liberal imperialism” to the Lebensraum of the Third Reich—have often been seen as one reason for the region’s anxieties, in the time of the Iron Curtain it was itself torn between West and East, the erection of the Berlin Wall making it the scene of the confrontation between the “free” capitalist democracies and the “unfree” world of state socialism. Post-1989 reunified Germany, in the ongoing dispute over the general trajectory of the post-socialist transformation, has had to cope with the political consequences of ever-growing inequality, as well as the dispossession of memory and identity. The hasty adaption to global capitalism—in which the states and societies of the former Eastern Bloc were deprived of their history and agency, and forced into a logic of “catching up”—had led to the obliteration of the gains of the GDR democracy movement, which was actually seeking a “third way” [Dritter Weg] between capitalism and socialism; another loss that is exploited today in the form of populist, resentment-driven political movements. 

Beyond these tensions, history lingers: while, after the Second World War, Poland lost around 20% of its territory in the east—which, in the long run, allowed for the formation of the nation-states of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine—Germany, as retribution, lost a significant part of its pre-war territory to Poland. Such shifts were not only lines drawn on a map, but resulted in immense waves of (forced) migrations, whose aftershocks are visible until today. They also produced a sense of loss in both societies, an ambivalent nostalgia. In postwar German society, balancing the acceptance of guilt against coping with grief over lost homelands remains a disputed topic—something the far right has always known how to exploit. We are convinced that, at a time of revisionist politics, returning imperial fantasies, but also strong decentering tendencies and migratory crises, the very idea of a border is a topic that must be addressed. In the case of Germany and Poland, our political border is more a screen than a limit (as is the former border between East and West Germany): we barely see each other across it, while the condition of both our statehoods and identities remains entangled, emergent, haunted. These are the issues questioned and perspectives opened up by Unreal Estate. The presentation is divided into three chapters: the first, Speak, Volumes, a solo exhibition by Annette Kelm at MOCAK, is followed by A Possible Arrangement at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, and Shifting Strata at the Potocki Palace, Photomonth’s main venue.

The artists represented in the exhibitions approach these entanglements in different ways, often indirectly. One discernible strand of work focuses on personal and family experiences, as well as on the structures of post-memory, to shed light on the current state of affairs. Works by Fungi (Phuong Tran Minh), Karolina Gembara, and Anna Orlowska inquire into how a critical assessment and (re)telling of unresolved histories can influence our self-understanding, not only in individual terms. The topics they touch upon are displacement and connection to the land, (not) belonging, and also the sometimes repressed and not always visible histories of emancipation. Here, Ines Schaber’s visual research into the political representation of the German Peasants’ War, and Wojciech Wilczyk’s inquiry into grassroots monuments of the abolition of serfdom, shed light on interstitial spaces in the interpretation of historical revolt. Another strand addresses space not as physical extension but as a network of relations and an indirect indicator of societal values. Within it, Eiko Grimberg, Jadwiga Janowska, Arne Schmitt, Paweł Starzec, and Tobias Zielony look at landscapes as producing identities and conflicts, but also being expressive of identity structures, or scrutinize landscapes that have become territories of history, where multiple, often contradictory scenarios have played out and remain hidden in their layeredness until unpacked. Furthermore, the question of how life persists and metabolizes trauma extends to the practices of extraction and contamination—something Susanne Kriemann has worked on extensively and powerfully. A third strand focuses on societal and economic issues, such as the transition from state socialism to capitalism—its benefits, costs, and visual markers; a topic illuminated by Arwed Messmer and Tytus Szabelski-Różniak. Another approach—such as Susanne Keichel takes—is to ask how the value and dignity of work are socially distributed, politically negotiated, and visually coded today. Andrzej Steinbach decided to focus on the current state of the commodity: is choice of the way we consume or what we buy still a gesture of individual sovereignty, a building block of identity, of what we call lifestyle, or rather a marker in the process of profiling and predicting our behavior, our desires, our future choices? Inevitably, one question runs through all of these issues: where is it that we exercise our freedom as human beings? Is it in collective, public protests, or rather in everyday gestures and practices—is it about autonomy or chosen dependency? 

Concomitant is a problematizing of the position of the artist, as well as the exploration and questioning of the contemporary status of images—how and where they have agency, the power to tell important stories about the world we share, and what they can and should represent. These questions are addressed, for instance, by Annette Kelm’s work. That this is an especially important point in the era of social and networked images, amid the crisis of their claims to truth, underlies Jonas Höschl’s work. Contemporary lens-based art practices are the exact space where new strategies and forms of addressing these issues are being developed. All artists presented in this edition of Photomonth use the medium in hybrid, reflective ways—combining images with text, exploring their materiality in objects and installations, and practicing different strategies of narrating and sense-making. Many of them work in the transdisciplinary mode of inquiry that came to be called artistic research. Unlike traditional academic models, which rely on the idea of distance from the object of study, artistic research operates “inside-in,” generating situated knowledge from an entanglement with the object. It is not obsessed with fixed epistemic truths, but focuses instead on a “process of thinking and acting in the present shaped by the anticipation of a constantly revised future”—and although this anticipated future is precisely what we are after, it is not possible to push ahead without looking back. Photographic gesture bridges the gap between creative activity, affective and intellectual labor, and social action, reconfiguring the role of the artist and of the curator from a solitary individual into a relational subject, a researcher/teacher/student embedded within the “knowledge-based polis.”

Interestingly, Nabokov’s way of looking backward at things both ephemeral (“heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night”) and solid (familiar things in familiar places forming the “definite and permanent image that repeated exposure did finally leave in my mind”)—is very much photographic. The photographic manner of looking (repeatedly, appropriatingly) makes an object simultaneously more permanent and less real (not in the sense of less “there,” but rather less exclusive). Photographic appropriation opens the object to new meanings and uses: one becomes many. Photographing is a gesture of sharing, making available new possibilities for thought and feeling. The contemporary world seems so terribly opaque that it demands spaces and narratives in and around which we can gather to discuss, confront, and exchange. We would like Unreal Estate to become such a place.

Krzysztof Pijarski & Anna Voswinckel