Marta Bogdańska: Niebo i ogród

Marta Bogdanska's solo photography exhibition is the result of her eight-year stay in Lebanon and a new look at the photographs she took during that time. It is the first time that the artist presents her photographs from this period in the form of an exhibition many years after her departure, making it a form of returning to the past and working with her own memory, her own archive. It is also a journey to a world that no longer exists, as Lebanon has since been plunged into a deep political and economic crisis. Bogdanska's photographs are personal, nostalgic, at times absurd. The objects, objects or landscapes that appear on them form a visual diary. In it, the gaze of a tourist merges with the gaze of a person who knows the place well, but is still a stranger.

Bogdanska's project developed around the discourse of conflict - the constant fear and danger in the midst of which the people of Lebanon learn to live. An important point of reference for the exhibition for this reason became a poem written in 1990, by the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan It Was Beirut, All Over Again, in which the Lebanese capital Beirut appears as a metaphor for a world filled with war and violence. Bogdanska, in her works, sees this place in a similar way, but what is even more important to her is the resilience of people, things, plants to the evil happening; it makes them persevere despite everything - in an extraordinary state of fragility. A symbol of this resilience is the cedar tree that appears on the flag of Lebanon, whose strength, like everything else in the country, has been greatly strained in recent times. After all, the tree has become a victim of climate warming, but as a symbol it still, after all, refers back to the area's maritime power, which is also its curse. The artist traces these ambiguities, revealed in seemingly banal details, and her sensitive gaze goes much further than historical or geopolitical issues.