Tomorrow Tuesday at 7 p.m. the exhibition City of the Living/City of the Dead, a photographic project by Robert Wilczyński, will be presented at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The exhibition will remain here for one day before being transferred to the Centro Cultural Galileo, where it will remain until 25 May.
Organised by the Polish Embassy and the Instituto Polaco de Cultura, the exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and the Centro Sefarad-Israel.
The exhibition consists of 22 panels that superimpose archive photographs of the ghetto (from the collection of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum) with images of present-day Warsaw, accompanied by texts taken from diaries and memoirs written in the Warsaw ghetto between 1940 and 1942. In this way, the artist makes visible the city’s past, apparently irretrievably lost. In the face of the annihilation of almost the entire Jewish community of Warsaw during the Second World War and the destruction of its cultural heritage, the pre-war past appears in the photographs as ephemeral traces of presence. They permeate the contemporary urban fabric like ghosts, anchored in the vanished city and demanding to be remembered for their history. The exhibition coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The programme of events planned in Poland and other countries around the anniversary year can be found here.
