When: 31 August – 14 October 2018

Opening: 31 August 2018 (Friday), 7pm
Tour of the exhibition with the curator: 1 September 2018 (Saturday), 12.00

Artists: Irina Botea Bucan, Fu Yuzhu, Youkine Lefèvre, Betsy Schneider, Anna Skladmann, Viktoria Sorochinski, Patrick Willocq 

Curator: Radu Stern
Coordination: Paulina Kuhn
Production of the exhibition: Wojciech Ruminski

It is undoubtedly that children are the most photographed subject in the world, outnumbering by far the extraordinary spectacular sunsets, the Canale Grande in Venice, the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Great Wall in China. From the democratization of the medium at the end of the 19th century, photographing their progeny generated a colossal amount of rather similar images of what one could call a pictorial history of the family. Traditionally, that story began immediately after birth with the canonic photograph of the baby on the belly on a white sheepskin and followed the child’s evolution to adulthood. Due to the technological progress, today this kind of personal visual history begins even before the actual birth as echography has made the baby visible when it is still in her mother’s womb.

However, this kind of images, carefully kept in a cherished album, have little interest beyond the family circle. Nonetheless, almost from the invention of photography, there were artists whose ambition was to go beyond the individual and explore childhood, a far more complex endeavor. They approached the concept not primarily as a biological stage but as a social construct. Today, this perspective continues to inspire contemporary artists. The exhibition presents a selection of recent work that continues to investigate the complexity of childhood by artists from Belgium, China, France, Germany, Romania, and the USA.

Tags: exhibtion